Reinforce Your Child's Giving Habit with Holiday Charitable Traditions

Family traditions are a wonderful way to turn positive behaviors — like charitable giving — into regular habits, and year-end holidays provide the perfect anchor point for establishing annual charitable traditions with your kids.

This year, we continued our simple but powerful Thanksgiving tradition of making hand-made holiday cards for the troops as originally described in this quick charitable family project post two years ago.

If you’d like to participate in Operation Holiday Card this year too, you’ll have to hurry! Your cards need to arrive to the team in Shreveport by Wednesday, November 30th.

Looking for examples or perhaps a little creative inspiration? Here are our cards from this year. The heartfelt messages give me goosebumps every time I read them.

Can’t see the embedded slideshow? Try viewing on Flickr here.

Looking for more kid-friendly charitable giving ideas? See these related posts:

• Need a Last Minute Stocking Stuffer? Try the Gift of Giving...
• DonorsChoose.com: A Neat, Convenient Way to Introduce Kids (and Others) to Philanthropy
• Minimum Requirement: 5 Minutes and a Heart

Happy holidays!

New Feature: 1 Step Transfer Between Virtual Accounts

Just recently, we added a nice little convenience feature to FamZoo that has been in high demand for a while: the ability to transfer money between virtual accounts in a single step (as opposed to the tedious Texas two-step of debiting one account and then crediting the other).

(Not familiar with FamZoo’s online Virtual Family Bank? Find out more here.)

Here’s how it works.

Click on the transfer link. It appears in the footer of the Account Balances and the Account Activity summaries on your Overview tab. You can also find it on the Accounts page or the Transactions page under the Bank tab. Look in the the left hand sidebar under the Actions section. Note that the transfer links will only appear if you’re signed in as a parent and have more than one account in your family, or if you’re signed in as a child and have been granted credit/debit permissions on more than one account.

Fill in the transfer form. Clicking on the transfer link brings up the form named Transfer Between Accounts. Pick the source and destination accounts, fill in the date and the amount of the transfer, and add a description and memo if desired. Click the transfer button at the bottom of the form to make it happen.

Check out the two matching transactions. After the transfer, you’ll notice two special matching transactions — one in the source account and one in the destination account. Look on your Transactions page under the Bank tab and you’ll see that transfer transactions are easily spotted by the little colorful arrow icon in the description field. You can jump to the matching transaction in the other account by clicking on the account name link in the description. After jumping, the matching transaction briefly highlights in orange to make it stand out.

Got questions? Feedback? Other requests? Just leave a comment below, or contact us privately if you prefer, and we’ll get back to you. We love hearing from you.