How to Encourage Your Kids to Save and Give with Matching Contributions

In the adult world, it’s common for an employer to match a percentage of an employee’s contributions to a retirement account or a non-profit organization. Employers know that a matching policy is a powerful stimulus for driving good saving and charitable giving habits by employees.

Parents will find that the same technique works well with kids. That’s why we’ve made matching super simple for parents to administer in FamZoo by adding an automatic matching capability to our virtual family bank accounts.

Here’s how it works for a typical scenario: Suppose you’d like to encourage your daughter’s charitable giving by kicking in a 50% matching contribution for every deposit she makes to her charitable account.

Edit the Account Settings

To set up the 50% matching, locate your daughter’s charitable account on the Accounts page of the Bank tab, hover over the account with your mouse, and click on the pencil icon to edit its settings. (If you don’t already have a charitable account set up for your daughter, you can click on the Create Account action link to create one.)

Fill in the Matching Credit Details

Check the box to turn on automatic delivery of matching credits. Fill in a matching percentage — 50 in this case — and a description to be included as part of each matching credit transaction. We’ll use “Charitable match from Dad.”

The Next Time a Deposit Hits the Account...

Now any deposit into your daughter’s charitable giving account — whether it’s an automatic one from an allowance or chore, or a manual one from an odd job or gift — will be followed by a matching deposit of the specified percentage. To generate a sample matching transaction, let’s say your daughter gets paid $20 for some babysitting next door and you choose to split that between her accounts using the Split Credit form with 10% of the $20 (or $2) going to her charitable giving account.

A Matching Credit Will Automatically Appear

After completing the split credit, you can visit the Transactions page to confirm that the appropriate matching credit transaction has been automatically added to your daughter’s charitable account. The matching transaction description includes the match description we supplied earlier (“Charitable match from Dad”), the matching percentage (50%), and the amount being matched ($2). The Memo field identifies the original deposit that caused the match, which should appear immediately below.

A subtle note about deleting matching transactions: if you delete the original transaction, the matching transaction will automatically be deleted as well. The converse is not true. If you delete the matching transaction, the original transaction will remain untouched. That makes it easy to selectively undo an individual matching contribution if desired.

Happy matching!

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to contact us.