Homeschooling for 3

The Family Mint is an excellent way to train children in the art of financial planning. It’s also a good way to get Mommy to think about balancing her own checkbook once in a while too.

The premise of the Family Mint is that the parents are the bankers and the children are our customers. Each child gets their own account. As the banker whenever you give your child their allowance you would deposit the sum into each child’s account. As the banker you can designate what each percentage of the money goes towards long-range saving. The children are able to setup their own financial goals and timetables. When they wish to withdraw money from the account, as the parent you have the option of approving each request or trusting them to do the right thing. As the banker, parents can also add interest to their children’s account if they choose or do a dollar matching program if you like.

My family has been using the five envelope system – Long-Term Savings, Learning, Charity, Fun, Planning, so that’s how each of the girl’s have set up their account at the Family Mint. The money that is left in the General Savings category is their spending money for the month. I still have the children put their  money into the five envelopes, but now they also double-check themselves online. When they look at their accounts they have a graph that shows them how close they are to their monetary goals. In the spirit of this review, we also setup a savings account in our local bank so that they can get used to the whole banking experience.

There are many graphics that the children can apply to their goals and if they like they can even upload their own pictures. We’re planning on going on vacation in September so the girls had to decide how much spending money they want and then allocate the amount of money they need to save in order to reach their goal. This exercise has also been good for me as well — bookkeeping isn’t one of my favorite things to do.

Family Mint has a very nice interface and is relatively easy to use. I had a few minor mysteries, but the customer support at Family Mint was very helpful and quick to answer my questions. This is a free service to families and uses advertising to support its services. Although it may seem strange to have advertisements around when you’re teaching your children how to save money, it actually does serve a purpose in my mind. We are constantly bombarded with advertising, so they need to learn that they don’t need to buy everything that they see.

Khalid Family Rating: 5 out of 5

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