As soon as your children are born, you have a moral responsibility and obligation to care for them. Parenting can be complicated and overwhelming, but you have an important role to play in nurturing your children and ensuring they grow and develop as healthily as possible. This is a serious commitment and a time-consuming one, but it’s essential to help prepare them for their future as an older child, teenager and adult, and that includes saving for your children’s future.
As a parent, there are other ways you can look to start preparing for the future alongside nurturing their personal development. Saving for your child’s future is a good way to gradually build up a nest egg that your child can benefit from when they are older, but when should you start saving ideally?
Start saving as early as possible if you can
If you have the financial stability to put money aside for your children while they are young then it’s advised to start as early as possible. Why? Because saving of any kind takes time and patience, and gradually putting money aside every month over many years will help to build funds in your child’s name that won’t put you in financial jeopardy month to month.
You can open a children’s savings account in your child’s name with yourself as a signatory, giving you an easy place to build up savings over time. The earlier you start, the more compound interest you can earn too – which essentially means that the money you have saved up for your child will gain more interest as it keeps growing over years and decades.
How it will help them
Saving for your child’s future is a great thing to do for several reasons. First of all, it can provide them with a financial stockpile that you may not have been fortunate enough to have yourself. For example, it could be a pot of cash that they use to buy their first car or to put a deposit down on their first home when they are ready to make that decision. By sacrificing a little of your income while they are growing up, you can afford them many things that you might have wished you had in your own experience.
Getting your children involved with money as early as possible is also a recommended strategy to help them develop healthy money habits as they grow up. Unfortunately, financial education isn’t taught in schools but you can teach your children its importance yourself – a savings account can be a fun and interactive way to introduce the concept of money.
Tips to help you save
So, you should be looking to start saving as early as possible to give the savings account the best chance to grow over time, but that might not always be the easiest thing if you’re not financially stable yourself. First of all, look at your own finances to see where you can optimise your spending and income, potentially giving you more room to save for your child’s future. Budgeting is a very good habit to get into if you don’t already.
As with any saving, putting money aside at the start of the month is the best way to save a lump sum reliably over a long period of time. Choose an amount to start contributing to your child’s savings account, even if it’s £50, you can always increase or decrease the amount you deposit as time goes on. Good luck!
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