Did anyone else do NOTHING with the £250 Child Trust Fund

[WarblingEttie]

I just left it where it was and need to find out where it is as DS turns 18 on December 🤔

What did everyone else do?

My dc 14 and dc 12 both got it.

We never added to them and I don't think I updated our address when we moved nearly 4 years ago so I've no idea what's in them now. I think the last time I saw a statement there was over £1k in the eldests one though, with no input from us.

I consciously chose not to contribute to them as I'd feel very uncomfortable handing over a lot of money to an 18 year old with no control over it. We've always just considered that whatever's in there will be a birthday present for them at 18 and if they spend it at the pub then so be it 🤷🏻‍♀️

We have a 5 year old too and will gift them the same amount at 18 as the older 2 got, to make it fair.

We didn't add to our DC CTF as we didn't have any spare until the last couple of years. Should be around £5-600 in it. But we have saved in a separate account which is a much bigger pot in just 2-3 years in comparison.

On a slightly related note since a CTF is investment based, I put £30 a month over 10 months into my work investment shares scheme totalling £270. Its now worth £1,200 in just 10 months. Just over two years left to run, but projected to be worth about £3k at the end.

I advise people to dip their toes into the world of investments, ideally with your employer. Ours is a win-win type of investment scheme.

Lol stealing money?? They added to it and it’s still there so pretty sure
thats the opposite to stealing and clearly the sensible choice

DD's is still in the original CTF that it went into 14 years ago. We paid money in during the first couple of years (before divorce), it is also linked to Kidstart so if I get cashback through shopping then that goes into there (although I mostly use top cashback nowadays there is still the odd bit that goes through Kidstart.

It stands at this at the last statement: (I keep a spreadsheet to track its growth).

250 - voucher
615 - invested by me
495 - kidstart cashback
30 - nectar points
1450 - increase in value

£2840 - value in February statement

Although today it is worth £2497 - todays value after recent government shenanigans. But it will bounce back, it has before.

So it has personally cost me £615 and is worth £2497. Combined with her other savings, she should have £5-6K when she reaches 18 which is enough to help through Uni, or buy her a car.

I had to stop saving into it due to divorce, people do need to stop and think before they criticise people for not putting into their kids savings, as we are not all in the same boat and I had to prioritise the mortgage and bills as a single parent.

Whycan'tIbetangy. you've posted on this mums net thing, presumably, to receive advice and learning debate peoples thoughts. Calling someone 'Weird' for her simple suggestions is ignorant. It also lacks empathy.

Never paid in another penny. We get the statements but it's not worth more than £400 I think. Didn't believe in it at the time. Still don't. When ds gets it in 5 years we will have to find the equivalent for dd as she was born too late. And both of them will blow it I'm sure.
We have savings for uni, house deposits, cars etc all planned. But no way will they be in control of large sums.

The gov invested ours for us. She's just cashed it in, worth about £450. It's easy to find out through gov.uk where it is

Added a small monthly amount to my daughter's for a few years and it was about £2000 when she cashed it in. It was spent on her car which she would not have been able to afford without it.

We put it in a HSBC stocks and shares CTF (which wasn't a great choice and performed quite poorly compared to a lot of others), and a some point fairly soon after started paying £100/mth into it and kept it at that amount until the last month before he turned 18.
We got a bit nervous about him having a fairly significant amount of money at 18 (especially when nearly everyone else we knew chose not to save for their child in this way and kept more control) so there were frequent financial conversations in his teen years and we also gave him some money to blow on what he wanted at 18, whilst strongly advising that this was completely reinvested elsewhere (which is what he did).

I didn't have a clue what to do with my dds she now almost 15 so I took it into my local branch of HSBC at the time (now closed down obvs) they sorted it for me and put it into an account for her. I've never added to it as we also set her up a separate savings account but last time she received a yearly statement in April in the post there was over £1000 in it.

This is a fascinating thread! There seem to be two main groups of people on here:

1. left the money where it was, didn’t add to it.
   Now it has increased 3-4x in nominal terms (ie is now £750-1000) although over 18 years there has been inflation so in real terms (what you can buy with the money at today’s prices) it’s more like 2x. Enough to buy a phone but probably not the latest iPhone, or a couple of weeks of uni tuition fees.

2. added to it over the years, now worth between £10-30k depending on timing/how much contributed - close to flat deposit territory. This group seem most likely to describe it as a “super scheme” although their own contributions have dwarfed the original £250.

It would be really interesting to see how much savings behaviour has changed since 2011 when the “free money” CTFs were abolished and JISAs started. In theory there’s no good reason why the second group couldn’t start a JISA with £50 of their own money and make the same contributions to that instead - but did they?

The other interesting question is to what extent the scheme achieved one of its objectives which was teaching children good savings behaviour.

My impression from this thread is that most children seem oblivious of their CTFs until they approach 18 and their parent/s ask them what they want to do with the money….

My parents got a very similar thing (the same? I don't know) when I was little. They topped it up £200 a month throughout my childhood, and my mum STILL pays into it now (I'm 38!)
I didn't even know of it's existence until about 10 years ago, and it's now worth about 120k. I am well aware of how very lucky I am, and am very grateful.

It will be your sons money, so in theory he can do what he likes with it.

We have continued to add to ours. Youngest DC didn’t get the Government contribution so we put it in instead. DCs now have around £20k each. They are 12 and 9. 12 year old knows about it and knows that it is to pay towards uni as we’ve discussed this. Youngest doesn’t really know about his but he’s already proving to be a greater saver so I have no concerns that he will waste it. Hoping to get to around £30k each by the time they turn 18.

We never bothered as DS will never go to university, drive a car, buy a house or live independently, etc, etc.

Thanks to our pensions, savings and other assets he will be well taken care of.

He gets his next year and has no concept of money so I am having to get POA to access it.

Ds turned 18 in feb and he had about £2.5k.
when he was young I did add extra money into it. Can’t remember how much. Probably £25 a month.
But I had to stop when I split with ex.
he has just passed his driving test and has kept it to buy a car.

Dd is 15 and has £1.5k at the moment.
I feel a bit bad that ds will get more but I’m not in a position to add to it currently.,

@Cloverforever - strangely enough he is quite keen to get a car 😂

I actually wish I hadn't invested mine. If you don't do anything with it, the Gov invested it for you. Now they would have people who actually knew about this sort of think doing this, you know, experts, instead of me.

You are extremely annoying.

We pay in £20 a month into both DCs accounts, they'll have about £5.5k I think, I stopped paying into the trust funds as the interest was dropped to next to nothing, was about to move to a better account then just as we were about to transfer the money that interest rate was dropped also. We are paying into a Santander 123 mini account instead as interest rate is slightly better.

Both DSs have been told what its for and neither want to just spend it, they want to save towards house deposit as it stands at the moment, they are currently 16 and 14.

More annoying than your cat?

We moved DS CTF to a Onefamily account. We have added to it whenever we could over the years currently paying £50 monthly. Not sure whether to increase that now as the unit prices have decreased. The shares have lost about 0.20p per share over the last few weeks. It still has 3 years until it matures, hopefully it has time to recover.

@Ziegfeld I'm in your second group. I would not have opened an investment/savings account for my DCs on my own, but as one had been opened for them on my behalf, I started contributing to it. Is that's what's called a "nudge" in politics?

Knowing our family finances, otherwise the money would have been eaten up by household expenses and our DC would not be in flat-deposit territory now. I imagine that this is exactly what the Government hoped people would do!

I think we moved it to another provider. With the original government one it just lost money every year and there was no way we were adding to it. We should never have had it though, that money should have gone to someone who needed it.

I use to put £20 a month in, then I realised that as it’s invested it can go down as well as up in value and 1 statement showed all the extra money I’d put in had been wiped out.
I cancelled the dd and put it in an isa instead.

She accessed it recently and it was about £1500 but she’d had extra disability vouchers too at some point.
She brought a puppy with it.