Financial Autonomy

Episode 65 – The challenges of investing for children With the cost of housing continuing to climb, in addition to the rising cost of tertiary education, many parents and grandparents are worried about what the future holds for the young people in their lives. Last week Michael contacted me. He has a young daughter and was thinking of starting an investment for her, where he’d perhaps tip in $25 per week, so that when she was a young adult, there’d be a pool of money to get her off and running. He’d seen a lot written about ETF’s so he figured that must be the way to go. But his initial enquiries weren’t bearing much fruit and so he reached out to me, to establish whether there was something he was missing. Why is it so hard to start investments for children. The first barrier Michael found was that he couldn’t actually establish an investment in his daughter’s name. I confirmed that there’s two reasons for this. One is because, to establish an investment, whether that be buying shares through a broker, or in