Dub Family Saving

As I write this, it was the event that occurred last night that inspired me to start a blog. As I said before, this is a way for us to have accountability, of ourselves, of each other. Last night as we were winding down for bed, the kids were discussing money. I believe it all started with my son saying he had thirty dollars, in which my daughter rightfully claimed that money as her own (she was right, mom knew it was hers). In conversation, it was mentioned that the best idea for their expendable cash was to invest it. Of course, this concept was foreign to them, as it is for most of us! It wasn’t long before my son brought fifteen dollars of his own and said “invest this for me in NVIDIA.” I had a chuckle as I pulled out my phone and showed him my Robinhood app and that I already had a small investment in the company (albeit, a single share).

The conversation dug deeper into the rewards of investing at such an early age, not only with the unknown of what those investments could look like years down the road, but the ultimate life lesson of saving your money and being responsible with said money. My son and I begin to look around on the internet, to see what options were available for a child to begin investing. I remembered just a week ago reading an article about the Acorns app having an Early Investor portion (although the article was about a rise in price for their premium service). Ironically enough, about six to seven years ago, I had used the app. I really enjoyed the “rounding up” feature, as it was linked to my bank account and it rounded all of our purchases up to the nearest dollar and invested those round ups.

I went ahead and logged into my old account, as I researched the Acorns Early – which from my understanding was a merge of Acorns and GoHenry. The concept is simple enough, it gives young adults the ability to have a debit card, to be able to manage their account – just as you would manage your own debit account. The part that I really enjoyed was the education side of things. They have lessons for the child to go through, teaching them the basics about money, savings, investments, economy, etc. I went ahead and upgraded to the Acorns Gold and got my son setup with an Acorns Early account.

Within the app on the parents side, I was able to set “tasks” in which it works as an allowance, and as he completes the tasks, he is able to see the amount that will be deposited into his account at the end of the week. I also went ahead and set an amount earned to each of the lessons, as a reward for doing the lessons and furthering his interest and education in finances. For the next hour or so, he was working through the first of the lessons, often repeating, “dad it just taught me what you were just saying..” For me, watching him learn about money and finances much, much younger than I did, was the rewarding part. To see the wheels turning, to hear the follow up questions he had or the ideas that were filling his brain.

As today is the first full day of having the app, he has already called me a few times this morning while at work – to let me know he has already completed more lessons and to offer suggestions on more ways he can earn money from “tasks”. Like any new thing, the rush and excitement in the beginning is always the strongest. My goal with this blog is to hopefully continue that desire to learn, to continue holding ourselves accountable for keeping that desire and wonder exciting.

P.S I forgot, I was going to add this link, just in case anyone was curious in the Acorns app in general!

Hey! Acorns makes it easy to save and invest. Join me and you’ll get a free $5 investment! As a perk of referring you, I can get a reward too. Learn more and see terms here. https://acorns.com/share/?shareable_code=A793YTD&first_name=Jeffrey