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How to Stay Alert About Activity on Your Family's Prepaid Cards

“Sheesh! Evan just spent over $15 at Chronic Tacos. We need to talk about that junk food habit. We’ve got plenty of good food at home that wouldn’t cost him a dime.”

“I just earned 21 cents in interest from Mom for the week. Sweet! It pays not to spend the money on my card.”

Card text Alert for a Chore Penalty“Busted. Dad just dinged me a buck for not making my bed this morning. I gotta shape up!”

“My weekly allowance just arrived. Now I have $54.21 on my card. I’m over half way to my savings goal!”

“What’s Haley doing buying ice cream at 2:41 today. I thought she had soccer practice at 2 o’clock...hmmm.”

10% of my allowance just went to my giving card. It’s at $25.33. I should make a donation on RedCross.org today.”

“I see Dad ran short of funds for my allowance payment just now. Sure glad FamZoo automatically tracks that as an IOU so I don’t have to remember to bug him about it.”

“Good to see that my transfer of $40 for Sarah’s little college emergency just went through. She should be getting her alert right now.”

“Looks like Payton racked up a $3 fee for a $40 ATM withdrawal. I need to tell him about the MoneyPass app to find the closest fee-free ATM.”

“Gramma just sent me $20 from Square Cash. She’s the best!”

“Looks like Quintin just downloaded a game for $2.99 on iTunes. I need to check that out.”


Those are all typical examples of card activity within a FamZoo family pack of prepaid cards. Good stuff to know in real-time, right?

So, how do you get set up to receive text messages or emails whenever there’s card activity in your family? Just follow these simple steps:

  1. Sign into FamZoo as a parent.
  2. Click on the Bank tab to get to a listing of the accounts in your family.
  3. Hover your mouse over the prepaid card account for which you’d like to receive alerts.
  4. Click on the pencil icon to get to the Edit Accounts form. (Alternatively, click or tap on the Edit action link in the left-hand sidebar and pick the desired prepaid card account from the drop-down list.)
  5. Scroll down to the Card Activity Alerts section and click on the Add An Alert link to identify the recipient and the type — either text message or email.

Card Activity Alert Settings

For parent cards, you can set up alerts that notify yourself and/or any other parent in the family. The same goes for child cards, but you can set up activity alerts for the child using the card too.

Now you’ll be ready to deliver that just-in-time financial education (or intervention) to your kids.

2 comments:

stepan aka The Blog Post Author

Is there a way to configure a low balance alert? Specifically, I would like to be notified when my funding account goes below a certain threshold, so I have enough time to refill it.

Bill Dwight aka The Blog Post Author

Hi Stepan, we do not have a specific low balance alert at the moment - just activity alerts for any activity on a card. Each alert includes the current balance, so parents typically turn on the activity alerts for their funding card and keep an eye on the balance amount. Having the more focused alert would certainly be nice though, and it's on our list for the future (just no firm date yet).

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