30 Family Finance Tips For Financial Literacy Month

• April

  1
  Start 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.
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• April

  2

  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.

  👉 More info

Use AI to Clarify What Kids Buy

AI models are getting better and better at decoding the cryptic charges on your kid’s card.

If you receive a card activity alert or see an entry in a card’s transaction history with a description you don’t recognize, try consulting an AI model from a trusted provider to track it down.

🔒 If you suspect fraud, be sure to lock the card while you investigate.

Case in point: A FamZoo parent recently asked me if I had any insight into this obscure purchase description: “8006837392 USA”.

I turned to ChatGPT for help using the following simple prompt:

Seeing How Kids Pay Keeps Fraud at Bay

Many kids do not know that how they pay with their cards matters when it comes to protecting funds from fraud. 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.

FamZoo has a unique feature that encourages kids to pay more securely. For each transaction (whether successful or not), we show the “card entry mode” on the Transaction Details screen. The entry mode indicates how the payment was made (or attempted in the case of a decline).

6 Traits of a Well-Tuned Allowance

Do allowances spoil kids?

No, parents do. Allowances are just the misused vehicle of choice.

Applied correctly, allowances don’t spoil. They teach kids to be responsible and thoughtful with money.

If you’re seeing otherwise, your allowance approach needs a tune-up.

A well-tuned allowance:

Teach Kids How to Sniff Out Card Phishing Scams

Have you coached your kids to be on the lookout for sketchy calls, text messages, emails, and sites?

Unfortunately, advanced AI technologies are escalating the frequency and sophistication of phishing attacks. Your kid’s cards are in the crosshairs.

This classic example of a phishing text landed on my phone just the other day: