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April1Start a “Family 401(k)”. This is my all-time favorite family finance hack for teens with W-2 income from a summer or part-time job. It combines a Roth IRA with annual family matching. The arrangement encourages getting a job, forces a long-term investing mindset, and can be truly life changing decades later thanks to the magical power of compounding.👉 More info
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April2
Use AI to decipher unexpected charges. As your kids learn the financial ropes with their first debit cards, the chances are near 100% that you’re going to stumble across charges you don’t recognize. When you do, try consulting an AI model from a trusted provider to track them down. The models are getting better and better at decoding cryptic charges and suggesting how to handle them.
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April3
Use the safest card entry mode to minimize fraud. Most kids don’t know that how they pay with their cards — the “card entry mode” — matters when it comes to protecting funds from fraudsters. For example, swiping the card’s magnetic stripe through a point of sale device exposes the card information to potential skimming devices. Dipping the card into a chip reader or using mobile Tap to Pay doesn’t. Teach kids these 6 different entry modes and their relative security levels.
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April4
Tune your kid’s allowance to make it a better teaching tool. If your child isn’t learning anything from their allowance, it’s time for a tune-up. A well tuned allowance tracks a budget, forces trade-offs, allows mistakes, enforces consequences, prompts ongoing discussion, and even saves you money. Yes, you heard that last one right!
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April5
Teach kids how not to be phished. Unfortunately, advanced AI technologies and social media are escalating the frequency and sophistication of phishing attacks. Your kids are in the crosshairs. Make sure they’re well versed in prevention, detection, and resolution.
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April6
Give your kid a spot bonus. Ever received a spot bonus at work? It feels pretty darn awesome to be recognized for a job well done. It’s the same for kids. Catch your child doing something good today. Then reward them with a bonus and a kind word.
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April7
Keep a sharper eye on card activity. Today’s best payment cards have excellent tools for monitoring card activity. Monitoring your kid’s card activity doesn’t make you a helicopter parent. Done right, it makes you a better money mentor, protects funds, and encourages transparency.
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April8
Pay kids to brown bag lunch. Brown bagging lunch saves about $8 a pop. For a full school week, that’s $40. Real money. With those savings, you can afford to cough up a little bonus as an incentive. Alternatively, tell the kids they have to use their allowance to buy lunch at school, but lunch fixings are free at home. Brown bagging lunch may be less “cool” from a teen’s perspective, but it’s healthier and it’s cheaper.
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April9
Use a two card system for smarter, safer teen spending. Impulse spending, peer pressure, phishing attacks, sketchy sites, dark patterns. There’s no shortage of scary things lurking out there in the financial jungle conspiring to consume the funds on your teen’s card. With this “Spend Now, Spend Later” system, two cards are safer (and more frugal) than one.
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April10
Give your kid a payday loan. Wait, what? Payday loans for kids? Never! Hear me out. Loans can be a valuable educational experience for kids to get under their belt. An allowance advance can be a good thing as long as it’s carefully tracked and repaid (with or without interest). Here’s how to set it up.
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April11
Tell kids what they need to know before calling in about their cards. A typical kid doesn’t realize they’ll need to prove they’re the cardholder when calling the 800 number on the back of their card. That’s standard security protocol. The card PIN, your date of birth, and the last four of your SSN are common identifying ingredients. Giving the wrong info or just hanging up can lead to a blocked card account and lots of frustration.
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April12
Review your 529 statements with your teen. How much does your teen know about the 529 account you opened for college savings? Nothing? Or, maybe you’ve mentioned it once or twice, but you aren’t sure it really registered. That’s the norm. Pretty dry stuff for a teenager. Here’s a radical suggestion. Review your 529 statements with your teen. And do it every quarter. Yes, your initial sessions will be received with eyeball rolls, yawns, or worse. But keep up the good fight. Through your consistent and repetitive efforts, your teen will gradually learn these six critical things.
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April13
Conduct an annual financial review with your child. If delivered diplomatically, a gentle audit will nudge your kid toward better fiscal habits in the year ahead. To set the right tone for a candid exchange, I like to break the ice by confessing one or two boneheaded financial mistakes of my own. Like when I wasted a gazillion dollars on an unnecessary storage locker — for 13 years! Hey, we all make financial mistakes, right? As you browse through your kid’s transactions from the past year together, here are several specific things to look for and discuss.
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April14
Teach teens budgeting with a clothing expense account. Parents often ask me how to teach teens budgeting basics. My favorite approach takes a page from the envelope budgeting system playbook, but with a digital twist. In the traditional envelope system, each category of spending has its own labeled envelope stuffed with the budgeted allocation of cash for the month. Purchases must be funded with the cash from the appropriate envelope. So, all clothing purchases come out of the envelope labeled “clothing”. Super simple. For the digital twist, replace the cash-stuffed envelope with an automatically loaded debit card. So, all clothing purchases come out of the card labeled “clothing”. Still super simple. And it works in today’s online world where cash is no longer welcome. When introducing teens to budgeting, I recommend keeping things narrowly focused. No need to overwhelm. Start by choosing just one envelope outside of everyday spending. Clothing is typically an excellent choice for teens. Here’s how to get your system up and running.
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April15
Mine declines for valuable money lessons. Most card providers sugar coat their transaction histories. If you open up their apps, you’ll only see the successful or pending transactions listed — no failed ones. Not so with FamZoo. We show everything: successful transactions, unsuccessful attempts, and even fraudulent hits. It’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. Why show the latter two? We believe a valuable lesson lurks in every failed transaction. You can spot a failed transaction in the history by looking for a red DECLINED lozenge just beneath the transaction’s date in the left hand column. Click or tap on the lozenge to reveal the details behind the failure. Here’s a sampling of five common failures and some important lessons to be gleaned.
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April16
Deliver parent-paid interest to teach youngsters the power of compounding. Traditional savings accounts are real yawners for kids. A few pennies at the end of the year. Woo-hoo! On the other hand, a parent-paid interest system lets kids experience the power of compounding using compelling amounts and short timeframes that they can truly appreciate. $1.06 this week. $1.25 the next. Nice! It’s an effective, hands-on way to instill an early saving and investing habit that persists beyond childhood. Here’s how it works.
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April17
Help kids recognize faux fraud. Things aren’t always as they initially appear — like unauthorized transactions on your kids cards. With over a decade of researching fraudulent transactions under our belt, we’ve compiled a list of classic faux fraud flavors — transactions that look like fraud, but aren’t. Check out the five most common patterns we see and tips for identifying them.
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April18
Fine kids with fake overdraft fees. The best youth debit cards do not charge overdraft fees. For such cards, an attempt to spend more than the balance just harmlessly fails rather than racking up a $30 bank fee. That’s great for the family pocket book, but not so great for Junior’s financial habits. Being cavalier about having insufficient funds as a kid can lead to big problems down the road. Imposing parent-initiated fees help nip bad behavior at the bud without hurting the family budget.
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April19
Know the common mistakes kids inevitably make with debit cards. Ow! Hot! Sometimes kids just have to learn what not to do the hard way. Think of it as touching the financial hot stove. Better a minor burn now than going down in flames later. That said, it’s smart for parents to know the most common mistakes ahead of time and mitigate the damage. Here are the top ten.
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April20
Set up the 4 bucket system for your teen. You’re looking for just the right financial setup for your teen. Not too simplistic: learning is the goal. You want your teen to master critical money management skills before leaving the nest. Not too sophisticated: no need to boil the ocean here. Don’t create a monster your teen hates and you can’t manage. This 4 bucket system is just right. Your teen will learn how to handle a card responsibly, monitor for unexpected charges, give every dollar a mission, pay themselves first, harness the power of compound interest, stick to a budget, and appreciate the value of a dollar.
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April21
Make teens pass the No Decline Challenge before graduating to a checking account. There will be obvious signs your teen wasn’t ready for a checking account: the $30 overdraft fee, the bounced check, the $10 monthly service fee for dipping below the minimum balance. Jumping from a piggy bank to a checking account is like jumping from a tricycle to a motorcycle. How do you know when your teen is ready for checking? When they can pass this test with their prepaid card.
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April22
Automate teen payroll deductions to boost summer savings. Summer paychecks have a way of melting away like ice cream in the hot sun. iTunes here, Starbucks there. By the time fall rolls around — poof! The summer earnings are gone. Time for a little “pay yourself first” parental intervention. Here’s how to set it up and how to get your teen’s buy-in.
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April23
Take your swear jar to the cloud. The swear jar is a time honored family tradition for breaking bad habits. Letting loose with a four letter word around the house used to mean coughing up some coins for the family jar. But now, like everything else payment related, families are taking the penalty pot online. See how.
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April24
Offer kids odd jobs for extra bucks. Linking the concepts of money and work is healthy, but paying kids to complete everyday household chores is controversial. “No one ever paid me to make my bed!” muttered half the parents out there. There is one thing most parents agree on when it comes to paying kids around the house: odd jobs are cool. Parents rarely raise an eyebrow when it comes to offering occasional extra paid opportunities for tasks that are out of the ordinary or, better yet, unpleasant. Here are several options to consider.
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April25
Coach kids on how to guard their cards. There’s a critical money lesson many parents overlook. It’s one of the very first lessons every card-toting child should learn: how to protect their money. Sadly, kids need to know that where there’s money, there’s fraud risk. Here are the classic ways cards are compromised and six suggestions for protecting them.
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April26
Teach kids these 11 important card numbers. As parents, it’s hard to remember what it was like to make that first debit card purchase way back when. What’s routine for us seasoned veterans can be a complete mystery to the uninitiated. There are actually quite a few numbers on (and off) the card that your child must understand to transact successfully and safely. What are those critical numbers? When do you need them? Where do you find them? How do you take care of them? Here’s a handy list.
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April27
Make reimbursement deals with your kids. Reimbursement deals are a powerful behavioral technique. They can incentivize desired behaviors, drive healthier account balances, raise awareness about how much real life costs, and encourage more parent-child money discussions. Here’s how to roll them out.
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April28
Let kids pick the split. Splitting funds between accounts earmarked for specific purposes is a valuable personal finance habit to learn. For kids, the classic trio of accounts is spending, saving, and giving. When it comes to splitting allowance, chore payments, or birthday money between the buckets, what percentages should parents dictate? Maybe none! Consider letting your kids decide instead. Here’s how to tee up that conversation for best results.
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April29
Require a written proposal for questionable purchases. “Why can’t I buy it? It’s my money!” What parent hasn’t heard that refrain? If “it” is cigarettes, that’s a short conversation. If “it” is some harmless, yet ill-advised item — well, that’s how kids learn to spend their money wisely. But what if “it” is in that gray area for a youngster of your child’s age? Maybe some form of entertainment that you find borderline at best. Then what? Try this written proposal technique.
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April30
Think long term when choosing your child’s brokerage firm. When selecting a company to use for your child’s first investments, think long term. Roll the clock forward a decade or two and think about where they’ll want those investments to live when they’re adults. It’s undoubtedly with an established brokerage firm like Schwab, Fidelity, E*TRADE, UBS, TD Ameritrade, Vanguard, or even a relative newcomer like Robinhood. It isn’t with a youth prepaid card provider that offers investing to a niche audience or as a bolt-on feature with extra fees. So don’t start there. At best, it will be a hassle to move your holdings. At worst, you’ll incur unexpected fees when the fledgling FinTech pivots to a new business model or you try to transfer your shares to a mainstream brokerage later. So when your teen is ready to invest, just pull the funds from their prepaid card into an account at an established brokerage firm with an ACH transfer. Here’s where to find the routing and account numbers you’ll need.
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