4 Popular Apps That Make Financial Learning Fun
Why not make learning about financial matters fun and interactive? Here are four popular apps to get your kids thinking about their financial future.
From budgeting to investing, apps are showcasing a different way to learn about different financial worlds. Here are some popular apps that make saving and growing money exciting for kids and young adults.
Acorns
The title of the app says it all; plant a tiny seed and watch it grow into a mighty oak. Acorns is an investing app aimed to help the young and mature alike. The app automates and simplifies the investing experience rounding up your purchases to the nearest dollar and using your spare change to invest into a diversified portfolio of exchange traded funds (ETFs) specifically recommended for you.
There are tiered options depending on the types of investing you’d like to start with. Acorns Early gives minors the opportunity to invest under custodial accounts that can be managed by their parents or legal guardians. This option allows kids to recognize that even the smallest investment can make a big difference in the long run. If you decide to increase the size of your investments, Acorns also offers to automate regular contributions into a savings account.
myHUB
Sometimes keeping track of everything financial can be overwhelming and it’s helpful to learn at an early age how to get the basics of budgeting down. That’s where Hughes Unified Banking or myHUB comes into play. The app allows you to sync all of your financial accounts (Hughes and non-Hughes accounts) to help you get a comprehensive view of your finances in one spot. From personalized budgets to cash flow spending wheels, myHUB gives you a fun, interactive visual on your money helping you easily find ways to save.
Greenlight
The Greenlight app lets you give your children a sense of financial independence while you help monitor their savings and spending. The app helps kids learn the importance of balancing your income and expenses by allowing parents to automate weekly or monthly allowances into a debit card and reward them when they complete tasks in the in-app chore list. You can also set store-specific spend controls and set up notifications to alert you each time the debit card is used. Depending on the situation, you can turn off the card or transfer money if needed.
Kiddie Kredit
Finances involve a lot more than just saving and spending. When young adults enter the working world, they’ll discover that they’ll need to establish a credit score in order to qualify for things like car loans, housing and more. Kiddie Kredit is designed for ages four to twelve and works to help establish healthy work habits while educating them on how a credit score works. The app allows parents to award children points when a chore is completed and those points are then converted into a mock credit score. Parents can also reward their children with money or with non-monetary perks like more video game or television time. Kiddie Kredit is designed to help simplify the understanding of the FICO credit scoring model and is a great tool to get the conversation on credit scores started.