To ask how much you are saving for your children?

[Namechangemum100]

Following on from another thread about savings, how much money do you aim to save a year for your children.

For us as parents, we are trying to aim for £1000 for each year of their life, DD is 18 months and Ds is 4 months. This money excludes birthdays, Christmas's and gifts from family friends (but that's virtually nothing anyway).

So how many children do you have, and what saving plans do you have for them.

€20 a month per child. Haven't set up the account for 11mo DD2 yet

£100 in a stocks and shares ISA since she was born. It’s performed well. All money given to her when she was born is also saved and her grandmother also has an account for her and all the grandchildren. I reckon by the time she’s 18 she’ll have around 50k. She knows that most of this money is either for her education or for a house. Her birthday money she will have access to and be able to do what she wants with it a lot earlier. She has about 5k in that account.

@NeverTwerkNaked if you’re setting up a fund, you can impose non-age conditions e.g. must be in a profession, married, etc.

I might be a bit jealous here but how are people saving! We don't have any savings ourselves. My husband earns a pretty good wage but we have 3 small kids so I'm a sahm.
We are selling our house and moving to a cheaper area so we can save for Xmas and birthdays and maybe a holiday each year. Then also hope to save some money for if the car needs fixing or house maintenance.
I guess if I was super frugal we could save for them but then we wouldn't be able to do fun stuff with them.
Hopefully when they're older we'll be able to start saving something to put towards a wedding or flat deposit. I'd definitely like to help them out

Save all the child benefit. To be managed by me for their education, travel or housing startups after 18. They will not have unbridled access! If you save in a child ISA you cannot access it and it will go to them automatically at 18. Other child accounts have as good or better interest and it is managed by the parent so you can switch it out approaching 18.

@Twillow do you happen to know which accounts are good interest - I don't want to put all DDs money into JISA, but am
Struggling to find a good account. Thanks!

DD (10) has a child trust fund, as they were creating them automatically when she was born, DS (7) missed out, but has a child ISA. I've been sending them a pathetically small amount (£15 each per month) for a few years, but a family member got an unexpected life insurance payout, so has just gifted them roughly £16k each, which is going to be paid out at £4k a year for the next four years due to pay-in limitations. So I'm probably going to cancel the £30 a month to them (as it seems hardly worth it when they've got the big lump sum) and instead get childcare vouchers each month againso I can pay for summer camps etc.

The thing I now need to work out though, is addressing the gap as DD's is being invested so is 'making money', whereas because DS just has an ISA, it's only got interest trickling in, so he's going to end up with a lot less unless we put some money in an investment or something.

I’m a single mum but went back to my native Canada where the government helps out substantially with childcare even with a good wage so right now I save his child maintenance payment (£400pm) and his child benefit payment (£385pm) for him. Assuming I don’t need to ever break into that fund, DS should have a minimum of £170k by 18, more so if investments yield some growth.

@NeverTwerkNaked it isn't terribly expensive to set up -- just paying for the solicitor to get the details right, and then the maintenance fees (because I don't want to handle the investments myself.)

I'm a little fuzzier on the tax aspect of things -- it's taxed on the income, but there's a difference in the types of income so they're taxed at different rates. Either way, it allows us to put aside money for the DCs with conditions on how it can be used, plus it's definitely beating my ISA & retirement accounts in terms of gains, which is nice.

Have saved £50 for each month in a F&C child trust fund account since she was born. Daughter is nearly 16 and it’s now worth £24k .... bit worried about handing it at 18 though!!!

I put £25 a month into a stocks and shares isa for my precious first born, neglected second born so far has nothing similar (I can’t afford) but I’ve hinted to the grandparents that if they think fairness in such things is important they might like to set up an account for him. I am fairly sure one of them will pick up the ball.

Three kids, nothing at the moment. Nothing to save.

Aiming to be debt free in about 3 years in which case we’ll be able to save quite significantly.

@ExpectingToFly We found a financial advisor through recommendations and one of the first things he did for us was break down our monthly income into what we could save, and then break that savings down into percentages -- 3% for income protection (life insurance, etc.), 12% retirement, 10% for emergency funds, etc. and that plan gave us something to start with. Apart from the life insurance, which is obviously a fixed amount, as long as I divvy up the remainder of the savings by the ratios we make progress towards all of the goals - saving for DC included.

It helped me stop thinking about money in a day to day (or month-to-month) way and helped me focus on the larger picture. I found it very useful!

£10 a month each into a building society savings acount which I hold in trust for them - partly to control access to it when they are 18 if necessary, and partly so that if it ever came to it we could access the money to feed them and put a roof over their heads.

My parents also given them £50 each birthday, Easter (?) and Christmas which goes straight into their savings accounts (they get a present as well from them).

Eldest DC has a CTF which the government contributed to, youngest DCs have Junior ISAs which we started with the same amount.

1 child. 1800 so far. She's 11.
Ive just started putting the child ben in too.
However, that is always dependent on whether i need that money to pay for something else for her.
Actually I've got go use most of it for school dinner from Sept 🙄

we had savings but have just spent it all on something that needed to be bought.

The kids have about £1k each, from their amazing grandparents. Birthday and Christmas money is spent on their activities/clubs. Not sure how sustainable that is as they get older, though. Hopefully I'll be able to work "properly" again when the youngest is at school (few more years yet!) and we'll have more money to save.....

We save 25 pounds a month for each DC (we have 2) into junior stocks and shares isas. There is also a few larger contributions in them from an inheritance and a couple of gifts so they both have about 3k at the moment. We don't aim for this to be a large sum of money, rather something along the lines of 10-12k (they are currently 5 and 3) that they can use to learn to drive and get a car / travel / support their 'fun fund' for university if they go.

I'm not sure it's worth saving much more than this just to hand over to 18 year olds that may or may not do what you are hoping they will with it! We are concentrating instead on paying down our mortgage so we can offer more regular financial support when they are older teens/ young adults.