The “Family 401(k)” is my all-time favorite family finance hack for parents seeking to help teens grow their wealth and investing IQ over decades. I’ve written and talked about the technique many times since 2011, and I’ve put it into practice with all 5 of my kids. The Family 401(k) is a homespun version of the workplace 401(k) program commonly offered to employees. With a workplace 401(k), an employer kicks in extra money to help the employee build wealth in a tax-advantaged company sponsored retirement account. With a Family 401(k), parents kick in extra money to help their child grow weal ..read more

How much does your teen know about the 529 account you opened for college savings? Nothing? That’s the norm. Pretty dry stuff for a teenager. Here’s a radical suggestion. ? Review your 529 statements with your teen. And do it every quarter. Yes, your initial sessions will be greeted with eyeball rolls, yawns, or worse. But keep up the good fight. Through your consistent and repetitive efforts, your teen will gradually learn the following: How much college costs. Circle the ending balance on the latest statement. Your teen’s eyes may light up the first time. Now, ask your teen to name a favo ..read more

“This Uber Eats charge must be fraud — we don’t live in SF!” Have you coached your child on what to expect when it comes to reviewing card transaction descriptions? If not, they might think a transaction is fraudulent when it isn’t. A classic point of confusion: as more purchasing moves online or in-app, the city or state mentioned in a transaction description is increasingly unlikely to reflect the physical location where the purchase occurred. Instead, it often maps to the business headquarters of the merchant far away from the point of sale. That’s why, no matter where you use Uber Eats, y ..read more

Now is the perfect time to sit down with your child and conduct a year-end review of their finances. If delivered diplomatically, a gentle audit will nudge them toward better fiscal habits in the year ahead. To set the right tone for a candid exchange, I like to break the ice by confessing one or two boneheaded financial mistakes of my own. Like when I wasted a gazillion dollars on an unnecessary storage locker — for 13 years! Hey, we all make financial mistakes, right? As you browse through your kid’s transactions from the past year together, here are a few things to look for and discuss: P ..read more

Parents often ask me how to teach teens budgeting basics. My favorite approach takes a page from the envelope budgeting system playbook, but with a digital twist. In the traditional envelope system, each category of spending has its own labeled envelope stuffed with the budgeted allocation of cash for the month. Purchases must be funded with the cash from the appropriate envelope. So, all clothing purchases come out of the envelope labeled “clothing”. Super simple. For the digital twist, replace cash-stuffed envelopes with automatically loaded FamZoo cards. So, all clothing purchases come out ..read more

George Samuel Clason’s 1926 classic, The Richest Man in Babylon, popularized the adage “pay yourself first” as a pillar of wealth building. Easy to say. Hard to do. Particularly for kids. How do we translate Clason’s undeniably sound principle into a lasting habit for our children? Follow these five steps: Start with separate subaccounts. Comingling funds complicates savings. Without partitioning, spending prevails. Your kids each need two purpose-driven accounts: one for spending, one for saving. If each kid only has one card currently, order up another one specifically for saving. That’s ..read more

Where did that transaction come from? Between kids just learning the financial ropes, teens pushing boundaries, merchants deploying dark patterns, and fraudsters pouncing on vulnerabilities, parents routinely have to don their detective hats to track down the source of “mystery” charges. Occasionally it’s fraud. Most times it isn’t (see Five Flavors of Faux Fraud). This month, we added a new tool to the FamZoo transaction tracking toolbox: merchant category codes, or MCCs for short. MCCs are defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and used to classify merchants by ..read more

Most card providers sugar coat their transaction histories. If you open up their apps, you’ll only see the successful or pending transactions listed — no failed ones. Not so with FamZoo. We show everything: successful transactions, unsuccessful attempts, and even fraudulent hits. It’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. Why show the latter two? We believe a valuable lesson lurks in every failed transaction. You can spot a failed transaction in the history by looking for a red DECLINED lozenge just beneath the transaction’s date in the left hand column. Click or tap on the lozenge to reveal the d ..read more

If you “grok” something, you really “get it.” It’s a term coined by the Sci Fi author, Robert Heinlein. It subsequently flourished in computer nerd circles — of which I have been a member since the early 80s. ? How do you know if your kid groks the incredible power of compound interest? Wait, let’s pause for a second... You are rewarding your kid with parent-paid compound interest, right? If not, stop. See the setup instructions here. If you need convincing first, read this classic article from the archives: Why a Traditional Bank Savings Account Doesn’t Teach Your Kid How to Save. Need even ..read more

Things aren’t always as they initially appear — like unauthorized transactions. Upon closer inspection, sometimes they aren’t unauthorized after all. Since we’re laser focused on (a) teaching kids the financial ropes, and (b) thwarting fraudsters on our platform, we investigate all unauthorized transaction reports very carefully. With your help, extra due diligence can yield a valuable lesson for a child or an important clue to cracking a new fraudster scheme. Or, sometimes, both. With over a decade of researching fraudulent transactions under our belt, we’ve compiled a list of classic faux f ..read more