Nothing beats a real story from a real FamZoo family. I love getting them.
The weekly summary already, last week, gave my 16yo daughter her first glimpse into the reality of having your own debit card.
She had signed up for Amazon Prime over the holidays (which was our original reason for going out searching for a pre-paid method so that she could buy Christmas presents for my wife and I, “without Mom and Dad seeing what I ordered”), with the intention of cancelling it at the end of her month free trial.
She “forgot to cancel it” and got the shock on her debit card statement in email. She came to me in a panic, and I told her that she just learned the hard way what happens if you don’t watch your money. Someone is always looking to get it from you. I told her that she was lucky that it defaulted to a monthly payment of about $10, and didn’t charge her the yearly fee of about $100.
I told her that she just got a $10 lesson, and it was cheap.
As it turns out, because she hadn’t used Amazon Prime in the time after she automatically “paid her monthly fee”, Amazon allows her to cancel it for a refund of that month’s service. I told her that was a lucky break for her, and not to expect that from everything that she signs up for. Read the fine print. Fortunately, Amazon is pretty customer friendly. Next time might not be so pretty for her.
So the FamZoo account is paying money experience dividends every month already :) This is the best money education tool I could imagine for the kids. I just need to stay on them, reminding them of their interest earning benefit, etc. so that they will gradually gain my enthusiasm about managing their money to their best advantage.
