5 Best Financial Gifts for Kids (Simple, Fun & Easy Ideas!) By April Sawyer
Giving a financial gift for a baby shower, birthday, graduation, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or just because you feel like it, can kickstart a kid’s financial future.
There are a few ways to give financial gifts, and they each have their own way of adding value and teaching a valuable lesson to the kids themselves.
The 5 Best Financial Gift Ideas:
1. Gift Precious Metals: Though perhaps not a common gift, coins, gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, and metal sculptures made of precious metals make wonderful gifts for kids and teenagers. Not only are these gifts novel and unique, but they’re also excellent long-term investments. If you want to get a kid started on the path of investing in commodities and building wealth with assets, a single precious metal coin is a perfect place to start https://amzn.to/4g33SvE.
2. Gift Stocks: Spark a Young Investor’s Interest. Giving gift stock to a child can introduce kids to a whole world of investing and personal finance, and give them the option to explore this world on their own. There are multiple kid-friendly stocks that are great as a first stock for a kid to own, like Disney, Apple, McDonald’s, and Amazon. These companies can also be found in the S&P 500. You will be surprised at how many companies these young kids are already familiar with. Teenagers can make the most of a gift of stock. The stock itself can provide motivation and open them up to new terms and experiences in the personal finance world. The gift will build up their confidence in investing and allow them to enjoy the benefits of compound interest with enough time to bounce back from any bumps in their investment portfolio.
Parents can use these to introduce young kids to the concepts of money and teach them about the different coins and bills. A fun exercise they can perform is to save spare change for a few weeks, and then take the kids and use their savings to buy ice cream. This would essentially be the child’s first purchase with the hard earned and waited for savings.
For slightly older kids, you can introduce them to digital banking and savings with bank accounts and apps like Brilliant Kids Savings Account (Spectra Credit Union). SCU has the highest APY 10.38% of any kid’s account we’ve found. It’s available on the first $1,000, so your little saver can really see their money grow. Take that little ceramic piggy or cool wallet to a local bank and deposit the funds into your bank account, then open an account for the kid.
Creating a high-yield savings account for a kid and contributing to it can introduce kids to concepts like saving for large purchases, spending vs saving decisions, and encourage them to save money for the future. If you open a high-yield savings account for kids that offers higher interest on savings balances, you can also teach the kids about interest and compound interest.
Once the kid has an account open, encourage savings, and contribute to the savings account. The new savings account can easily transition to be the child’s initial money for adulthood, making this a perfect gift.
4.Gift Financial Literacy:
Teach kids financial literacy, and they’ll grow to be financially independent.
Learning financial literacy from a young age can prepare kids to handle these financial products responsibly and simply teach them to manage their money.
Some of the other gift ideas we covered have elements of financial literacy and provide opportunities to teach valuable lessons, but you can also give a gift that directly focuses on financial literacy for the kids themselves.
A book is a gift you can open again and again. For younger kids, go with books that start introducing concepts like money. A great Children’s book is ABC’s Stocks and Investing for Babies by April Sawyer https://amzn.to/4oYzZAZ. For the older kids and teenagers, you can go with more serious books that talk about budgeting, saving, and an introduction to investing.
Games are another fun way to teach kids about finances. The Game of Life is a classic board game that can introduce kids to concepts like money, salaries, career choices, choosing between spending, saving, and investing, and more. Another classic financial board game is Cashflow https://amzn.to/4mI0sB7, created by the author of the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad” https://amzn.to/4ngHSA9, and it introduces more advanced concepts like passive income, investments, real estate, and overall wealth building.
5. Gift Cash Money:
Giving cash as gifts is perhaps the most straightforward way; just make sure to add a kid-friendly card to make it feel like a gift. Try ordering a creative money card from sites like etsy.com. Where you can find unique items you can’t find anywhere else.
A cash gift needs to be sensible, useful, and provide the maximum value it can, but all cash gifts need to have a great presentation and a little bit of personalization, so make it pretty!
Financial gifts can be so empowering to kids and can set kids up for success. Any kid receiving such a gift should be very happy & grateful.
