Teaching Teens to Manage Money with Virtual Piggy!

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As parents we all come to a point when we have to teach our children about managing money and many of us start out doing this with an allowance in hopes they just grasp the idea of saving. It’s hard when you are a kid, though, to have cash on hand when everywhere you go there is something that you want. Even the schools have shops now where you can buy souvenirs, sweet treats or forgotten supplies at 2x the price.

However, as parents, we don’t want to go opening up random bank accounts for our kids that don’t understand how they work and then we are left managing them and hoping they don’t bounce checks. The idea is to find a balance in the middle, a place where we can offer allowance to our children, that doesn’t give them “cash on hand” and yet works like a bank. Let me introduce you to Virtual Piggy, the virtual piggy bank.

My teen is about to turn 16 and I’ve been trying a myriad of different ways to teach him how to manage incoming funds, how to save and understand what financial goals are. Currently, however, what funds he has coming in come from me, from allowance or extra work he does around the house. It is hard for him to visualize his “bank” so he tends to spend money without realizing looking at the bigger picture. When given the opportunity to work with Virtual Piggy, it offered the ability for him to have access to his account and SEE his ‘bank’ and manage it as you would a bank account. Here’s an example from the webpage.

My teen could see how much was in his “Wallet”, his “Savings” and his overall “Net Worth”. He also had a Spending Limit, set by me, and had information on his Transactions, just as an overview of your bank account would.

Virtual Piggy isn’t just a virtual bank, however, it is a one-stop financial reservoir of information, goal setting and even online shopping. It not only helps parents navigate through the tough areas of teaching about money management with tweens/teens, but also provides us with the ability to assist them in making good financial choices – until they get the hang of it themselves. Let me show you how this works!

There are a couple ways to sign up. When you first go to the Sign Up for Virtual Piggy, you will be asked to put in your birth date. This is so they can know whether you are signing up as a Teen or a Parent. If you are signing up as a Teen then an email will be sent to the parent to give the Okay.

For parents, you can sign up and then register a payment method, or register through Paypal. Registering through Paypal is simple, it doesn’t cost anything, it just connects your Paypal to your Virtual Piggy account to offer payments towards your child’s account. It pulls your information over so you just have to fill in the rest of the information.

After you register, it will have you fill in the blanks: assign a password, put in (or confirm) your shipping address and apply a payment method (this is for giving your child’s ‘allowance’). The section for Child’s Profile allows you to set it the other part of the account for your child. It will offer them their own Sign In/Password.

After this is completed, you can add money into your child’s account. As you saw before, they can put that money into Savings or their Wallet. I want to show you the “Extras” they can do on Virtual Piggy.

Once your child is signed in (you won’t see it on your side) they can request to have stores added onto their account to shop at. Virtual Piggy has tons of shops and where they don’t have shops, they have Gift Cards.

Depending on your child’s age, they may or may not have to have parental permission in order to purchase or even connect a store to their account. If they try to purchase anything that has not been accepted by the parent, they will receive a notice to request permission and then an email will be sent to the parent.

Your child can spend or save their money as they want, but they cannot request more funds nor purchase anything over their current account status without parental permission as well. So you don’t have to worry about them somehow getting more funds off your cards than necessary.

So what do they do if an item they want is not in the stores or available via Gift Card? They can put it on their Wishlist! It is also a good idea for creating financial Goals. This is very simple when using Piggy Pick, a Bookmark you can put on your Toolbar that allows kids to attach any product they see online to their Wishlist. Here my son saw a game on Amazon he wanted to add.

Add PiggyPick to Dashboard.

Find desired item.

Click on PiggyPick and choose the item.

Write a description and put in price amount.

Item shows up on the Wishlist.

Your child can then send their Wishlist to you and you can go into your side of the account and purchase the item or at least see how much the item is and help them work towards their goal of saving for it.

The greatest thing about Virtual Piggy is that it is the parent and the child working together while having a visual bank to work with. The format is simple for kids to understand and doesn’t have all the added bits our adult bank accounts do that aren’t necessarily important at the moment. As they gain more responsibility and control over their spend thrifty selves, you can become more lax and allow them to control more of their spending/saving. Throughout it all, Virtual Piggy offers assistance for both parents and teens.

This is a really great program and my teen and I have been having fun with it. He sometimes likes to put things in his Wishlist that are pretty funny, but otherwise he has become more serious about his account. He earned the game he wanted and it helped him and I both be aware of things he needs and things he wants; ultimately what his goals were. Soon he’ll have his first job and I hope to say by then he has gained enough financial responsibility to be smart in managing his money.

Connect: You can find out more about Virtual Piggy on their website, by “Liking” them on Facebook and of course @FollowPiggy on Twitter.

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