Melat and her "big girl checkbook"
I’m not sure how many readers here at DebtKid have children, but I have two. In our family we joke that we didn’t have debt before we had kids. I actually believed this until a few days ago when I was clearing some old files and found our financial paperwork from when we were first married—before kids. I was really surprised about just how much debt we had. Car loans, small credit cards and, and student loan debt. Oh my! Even worse, we had nothing in savings. No emergency fund, no vacation fund, nothing.
Two adoptions later, we actually had about the same amount of debt we did back then before we felt like we were in debt.
We didn’t begin to feel the pressure of debt, until we had kids who rely on us, and when we realized that we were modeling unhealthy behavior over a long term. (We definitely don’t want to be supporting fiscally-irresponsible adults later on!)
Kids really do grow you up, don’t they?
Tomorrow my youngest daughter is turning four years old. Last September I brought her to America as an adoptee from Ethiopia. She’s a brainy, precocious little tyke, and extraordinarily responsible. She’d been socking away money in her purse from her chores for some time (when she wants money, she folds the socks on laundry day for a total of $.50 per load of wash).
She got some birthday money in the mail and a gift card for a bookstore in the mail today and asked to go shopping, so I shook down her room for all her money (and was surprised to see she’d consolidated it all into her purse!), put her ID in her bag and told her we’d go to the bookstore and the bank—and get her a proper “grown up” bank account like mine.
She carefully pulled four dollars and her gift card out to buy her two books at the bookstore, and then we went to the bank.
She walked up to the teller, plunked down her money, her Green Card and her passport and told the teller “I’m thinkin’ about it and I want a bank.”
Boy was I surprised, when she pulled her cash out of her purse, and gave the teller $158.75, and carefully reserved twelve cents “just in case” for her purse. (She must be knocking over 7-11s after story time or something—I don’t know where she came up with so much cash in eleven months!).
She’s excited to have her new bank book and was really surprised to learn that more money will come into the bank account just because she has her money there. My husband and I can model health money behaviors, and start teaching fiscal responsibility and stewardship from a young age.
I’m looking forward to trips to the bank with my little one to deposit her “sock money” complete with her little deposit slips. In later years, it will make for excellent math lessons but for now, it’s a great way for her to have responsibility for her bank book without the fear of the actual cash being flushed down the potty or meeting some other untimely fate.
These “kiddie accounts” usually take $5 to open and have no annual fee, so there’s no reason not to open one for your kiddo regardless of age.
(Just a side note that the interest rates are incredibly dismal, at 0.02%, so when the sock money accumulates to a little bit more, we’ll move her money into a money market account. Now that she’s got the savings bug, I expect we’ll have the minimum $500 in a little hot-pink purse around her by Christmas).
