Product Reviews

Goalsetter: Teach Kids Financial Literacy

Written by Debt.com

The Goalsetter app teaches kids how to save and earn money, and can be tied into an adult’s bank account for allowance or gifts. Read our review today.

It’s no secret that saving money for the future is important. Goalsetter is an app that offers a new way for kids to save for their goals, both big and small. With Goalsetter, kids can create their own financial goals and keep track of how close they are to reaching them, helping them save money for whatever is important to them.

How it works

The whole concept of Goalsetter, as well as its operation, are quite simple. First, parents open an FDIC-insured savings account for their kid. This savings account and the Goalsetter account are then linked. After that, parents and kids can create their own goals that they want to reach and add a price, for example, “New Bike, $200.” Money can be put towards this goal, and kids can receive the money in several ways.

Most of the time, money comes from the parents. Parents can directly deposit money as a reward for when the kids do chores, achieve something special, or just because. Parents can also set up auto-save to put aside a set amount of money every month to be deposited. There’s also a neat feature that parents can use while shopping; when they spend a certain amount with a credit or debit card—$3.75 for example—they can round the purchase up to $4.00 and the difference of 25 cents will be transferred to the Goalsetter account. Additionally, friends and family can give money to the account on special occasions just like a gift card.

Goalsetter’s strengths

While there are many other programs out there teaching financial literacy to kids, Goalsetter has some cool features, including:

  • The Easy and seamless transfer of money from Goalsetter to bank account
  • Quiz questions that help kids improve their financial literacy
  • An easy-to-use interface
  • Shows kids the value of saving money

Goalsetter’s shortcomings

If we’re going to talk about the good stuff, we’ve got to talk about the bad stuff, too. Below are some of the drawbacks we encountered:

  • Can only link one parent account for round-up savings.
  • Limited number of bank options—may not work with smaller local banks

Our take

All things considered, Goalsetter is a solid app. Besides its minor shortcomings mentioned above, Goalsetter succeeds at doing what it intends to do—help kids save for their goals and get them excited about doing so. The financial literacy quiz questions add a nice touch. If you want, you can reward your children money for correctly answering the quiz questions.

In Goalsetter’s future, it would be interesting to see a sort of “virtual window shopping” feature that allows kids to see the common costs of the goals for which they are saving. To stick with the new bike example, it would be beneficial for a kid to be able to easily see the cost of a new bike and compare the different bike prices on the market. This would help provide perspective to how big their goal really is. Since Goalsetter wants to improve kids’ financial literacy, this would be a great way to demonstrate to kids the value of money and how far their dollar will go.

If your aim is to help foster a money-saving mindset in kids, then using Goalsetter may be a wise choice.

About the author

Debt.com