Picture opening your latest bank statement and finding five hundred dollars in charges from a video game company.
You have no memory of spending it, you barely play, and you would certainly never drop that kind of money on outfits for a Fortnite character. You reach for the phone to report the fraud, and then it hits you. What about your ten-year-old? Surely a child understands that this is real money, and that five hundred dollars is no small sum. Right?
A client told us a version of this story a couple of years ago. He can laugh about it now, though it was anything but funny at the time. What the moment gave the family was a jolt of urgency. They had talked about money with their son plenty, yet they had never made the leap from teaching it to living it. They wanted him to feel the weight of a dollar and understand what five hundred of them really meant. So we built a game plan to start handing him real responsibility, in age-appropriate steps. The first move was a simple one: no more Fortnite purchases without a parent's okay. From there, we mapped out four more ideas, and they translate well to just about any family.
This is the age when the lessons move off the page and into practice. The jars from the earlier years give way to real accounts, real cards, and real decisions. Here is how to make that handoff a smooth one.
Give them an account of their own
Responsibility starts with ownership, and few things create ownership like an account with your child's name on it. Something shifts when the money is unmistakably theirs. Decisions get a little more careful, and the whole relationship with money grows up a bit. Treat the occasion as the milestone it is. Open the account together, talk through how it is meant to be used, and make that first deposit side by side. Then show them the simple, powerful fact at the heart of it: the amount you put in is the amount that shows up as their balance.
Any local bank can handle the basics. If part of your goal is education, it is worth looking at the newer banking apps built specifically for kids, such as Greenlight, Step, GoHenry, and Capital One MONEY. The right fit depends on your family, so weigh the features against what you actually want your child to learn. Most come with an app you can load onto their phone or tablet, or simply onto yours if they do not have a device yet. Since that app is where much of the teaching happens, take a few minutes to walk your child through how it works.
Turn the jars into real accounts
If you followed the three-jar approach from our lessons for the five-to-eight-year-olds, this is the natural next step. The spend jar becomes a checking account, the save jar becomes a savings account, and the rules you already set for those jars carry straight over. If this is your first time introducing the idea, talk through the essentials together: what share of each deposit goes to savings, what the savings account is really for, how to set a goal, and which everyday purchases now come out of checking.
If the accounts come with a debit card, do not assume your child knows how one works. Right after a purchase, show them that the balance dropped by exactly what they spent. Then take it a step further. What does the remaining balance actually buy? How many more purchases like that one before the money runs out? Is anything coming in to refill it, and what is the plan to make that happen? Most kids are thrilled to start using a card of their own, since it feels wonderfully grown up, and a little steady guidance alongside that excitement goes a long way.
One of the real advantages of the kid-focused platforms is that you keep a hand on the wheel. You can set spending limits, restrict where the card works, and get a notification the moment a purchase goes through. One of our advisors saw this firsthand when his daughter's card was declined for insufficient funds. The alert reached his phone right away, and what might have been an awkward moment at the register became a genuinely useful talk about planning ahead for the things she wanted.
Let their money start earning
Not every child is a natural saver. Some would happily spend every dollar the moment it lands, and that is completely normal. The trick is to show them that saving can quietly earn them money on its own. A savings account that pays interest is the perfect illustration. Imagine the account earns five percent, purely as an example. Set aside a hundred dollars and it grows by five, with no extra effort at all. The next year, that five percent is figured on a hundred and five, and the growth keeps building on itself.
That is the moment compounding clicks, and it tends to be an exciting one, because it means their goals can arrive sooner than they ever would from a jar on the shelf. In time, it opens the door naturally to a conversation about investing beyond cash. Some children in this range are ready and curious, and others simply are not yet, so read your own child and decide when the timing feels right. When it does, your OnePoint BFG advisor can help. We keep Financial Planning 101 and Investments 101 materials on hand to make that first conversation an easy one.
Keep tying dollars to real life
As your kids handle their own money more often, keep connecting those dollars to things they can picture. Take the five hundred dollars from the Fortnite story. Measured in chores, how many would it take to earn that much? You can also share how many hours it takes you and your spouse to bring that amount home, and how spending it on video game skins means giving something else up. Money decisions carry consequences, the same as most choices in life, and the sooner your kids link the effort behind a dollar to what it can buy, the better. Return to these conversations often, especially in the early going.
The grocery store is another ready-made classroom. Bring your kids in on the trip: share your budget for the visit, build the list together, and keep the total under that number. Explain how you arrived at the figure, and if it feels right, widen the lens to the other bills, the saving goals, and the giving goals that all have to fit alongside the groceries.
Then let them watch the tradeoffs unfold in real time. Is the name brand worth the extra cost, or will the store brand do just fine? If this goes in the cart, does something else have to come out? Moments like these build real judgment without handing your children the entire financial picture, and they keep you honest as the role model in the aisle. They will be watching closely, of course, as you start passing along what you know.
There are many good ways to raise a young steward, and the pace will look different from one child to the next, which is exactly as it should be. As with so much in finance, steady progress matters more than fast progress. The one path we would gently steer you away from is waiting until eighteen and then handing over everything at once. Our hope is that you found something here you can put into practice this week. And whenever you are ready to build a plan around your own kids, we would love to set up time with one of our advisors.
Investment advisory and financial planning services offered through Bleakley Financial Group, LLC, an SEC registered investment adviser, doing business as OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners (herein referred to as "OnePoint BFG"). For more information regarding OnePoint BFG including important disclosures, please visit adviserinfo.sec.gov.
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