Bomad makes it easy for kids to save up. You can even schedule a “repeat transaction” to move some of their allowance money into a savings account:

But what happens when they become adults? Now you owe them a lot of money, and you might not be able to pay up 😬. You’ll have taught them a valuable lesson, but it won’t be good for your relationship!

That’s why I encourage my kids to invest their savings. If that scares you, don’t worry - investments can be as simple as CDs (also called interest-paying time-deposits or fixed deposits, depending on where you live). Start by creating a savings goal in Bomad:

and when they reach it, head down to your local bank and put some real money into an actual CD account and deduct it from the savings account.

Personally, I’m not a fan of saving for interest. Inflation will beat you every time. That’s why I encourage my kids to save for assets. And it’s not complicated. For example, you can buy this small gold bar for $190:

(see here and here)

This is great for younger kids since it’s something they can see and touch. I actually bought each of my kids one of these for Christmas.

My daughter is saving for Bitcoin in £50 chunks. She bought her 2nd batch just a few weeks ago. In Bomad, you can add an “external” account to track the value of assets like Bitcoin:

Although she can’t touch the Bitcoin, she knows that paying £100 for something that's now worth £132 is smart 🙂. You can also use external accounts to track the value of CDs and gold:

How about saving for shares? To start with, you can keep the shares in your brokerage account on their behalf (if you don't have one, download Robinhood or similar from the app store). Then pick a share (like Roblox) and get them to start saving up for it:

We have an experimental feature to display the value of shares in Bomad. If anyone is interested in this, please contact me (see the bottom of this email).

Just a word of caution: don’t force investment on your children. Take it slowly and be guided by them. I had a disagreement with my son this week. Unlike my daughter who has an automatic repeat transaction to save some of her allowance, he doesn’t. When his allowance arrived in Bomad, he asked me to send half to his debit card for spending, and he put the other half in a Bomad savings account for a figurine. So nothing for investment.

The disagreement became quite contentious and half-way through it I realized that I was probably putting him off the idea of investment, so I backed off. Since then he has put some money aside for investment.

I hope this helps you get your kids started with investing.