Start a Spend Now, Spend Later System for Smarter, Safer 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 child's card.

How can you minimize the risk?

Get your child a second spending card!

Question: How in the world can two spending cards be safer than one?

Answer: when they’re part of a Spend Now, Spend Later System.

• One card is a Spend Now card used for purchases. Normally, it’s empty.
• The other card is a Spend Later card that is never used in the wild. It’s a safe holding tank for future spending.
• Transfer the appropriate amount from the Spend Later card to the Spend Now card just in time for purchases.

As long as the Spend Later card never sees the light of day, its funds will be fully protected from impulse purchases, card skimmers, merchant data breaches, phishing attacks, and other bad habits or nefarious actors.

If bad actors do get a hold of the Spend Now card or its numbers, they’ll be disappointed to find its balance sitting at zero. You'll see their futile attempts as harmless declines in the transaction history. Lock the card and order a replacement at the first sign of any shenanigans.

Setting Up The System

Here’s how to get your Spend Now, Spend Later System up and running quickly:

1. Order a second card to serve as the Spend Later holding tank by following the steps here. When it arrives, activate it, update the PIN, and keep it in a safe place so your kid doesn’t accidentally use it.
2. Redirect any allowance payments, chore payments, or direct deposits that were going to the Spend Now card to go to the new Spend Later card instead. That will make it easy to keep the Spend Now card near zero between purchases.
3. Turn on activity alerts for both cards by following the steps here. That’s the best way to stay on top of any purchase attempts in real time.
4. Show your child how to issue a transfer request to move money from Spend Later to Spend Now before a purchase. You'll receive a text message for each request. With a few taps, you can approve, partially approve, or deny each transfer request. The latter is handy for tamping down impulse or peer pressure driven buys. Just putting a little friction in the buying process will help your kid slow down and consider purchases more carefully.

As an incentive for participating in this safer, albeit slower, spending scheme without complaining and as a reward for any newfound frugality, consider showering your child with some parent-paid compound interest on the Spend Later card.

It’s a rare opportunity to increase potential upside by reducing risk.