This is my first post in a few weeks because I’ve been away. My family and I visited South Africa, then I attended a conference in Turkey. With a fresh and rested mind, let me take a moment to reflect on Bomad as a whole.

Bomad solves a simple, practical problem: keeping track of money for kids. This problem presents itself regularly in daily life. Let me explain what I mean by telling you how Bomad helped us during our trip to South Africa. 

My sister-in-law gave our kids some spending money in cash. One day we decided to make an unplanned stop at a bookshop I enjoyed visiting when we lived in Johannesburg - Exclusive Books Hyde Park:

(I found this picture in a list of the 10 most beautiful bookshops in the world. It incorporates a coffee shop and a restaurant with a gorgeous view of the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. It's worth a visit if you're ever in town.)

My daughter Michelle found something she really wanted to buy - a boxed set of the 3 "The Summer I Turned Pretty" books:

But of course, she’d left her cash back at the Airbnb 😱. At first I was a bit annoyed: why wasn’t she carrying the cash with her? How did she expect to spend it if she didn’t carry it with her?

But after I’d moaned at her, I realized that we’d been through this dozens of times before. In fact, she was probably used to just being able to Bomad these kinds of purchases - why should this time be any different?

So I took out my phone and quickly deducted the purchase from her spending account. But I warned her that the cash she had would become worthless to her when we left South Africa. 

Luckily for her we all found ourselves in the same boat just before we left and we managed to negotiate a swap for dollars with my sister-in-law. I kept the dollars and credited the equivalent in British Pounds to her Bomad account:

These are the kinds of simple, practical problems Bomad solves for us all the time.

Of course, these problems wouldn’t arise if I wasn’t intent on tracking money for my kids. Why do I do that? Well, because I think it’s the only way for them to learn about money. It’s not something that can be taught. They need to make their own decisions (with age-appropriate support) and learn from the consequences.

In fact, I think it’s very difficult to teach kids anything. They need to want to learn. I learned this lesson the hard way. But since this post is getting a bit long, let me save that story for next time.