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?

We did nothing. Have had no updates either. Have been trying to track it down for a while.

I did nothing, she had 600 in it and spent it all on her first holiday abroad with a friend. She had a great time!

We didn't do anything and it's not worth much more than it was originally. I don't know how other people are getting much higher amounts.

We did nothing because we moved not long after that and lost all the paperwork. They tracked my son down as he's 18 and it is now worth £450 - the worst of anyone I've heard so far, £200 extra in interest over 18 years (don't save with Natwest!).

He's off to uni next year, so I've advised him to take the whole lot out and invest it somewhere that pays some decent interest for the next year (not sure if he's done it though, his head's usually somewhere in the clouds).

I completely forgot about this, just managed to log in to check his balance and it's £2.84 less than the opening balance, how does that work?!

We put both DC's in a CTF and added £100 a month to each ( Child benefit money with a little top up). DC1 matured to £35,000 which he used as a deposit on a house in his Uni city which he lives in and rents out to his mates. We have always been very clear as parents how fortunate DC are and the importance of understanding money and how it works.

DD1 inherited £2k so although she fell outside of the dates for CTF, she already had a similar amount set aside when younger DD2 got hers - it came to nearly £2k having put nothing in.

Huge differences in the way people regard it - DD2 said her friends at school said their parents wanted to take the money away from them and made it very difficult for them to find the money and cash it in, the parents being so frustrated they couldn't get it for themselves. even when young people did manage to get the cash the parents were demanding a cut, or indeed all of it. As is evident here, some people regard it with contempt and others really value it - we're in the latter group; my DDs have carefully managed their money.

Why do you need to "find out where it is", surely it is exactly where you left it? iirc we got to decide what provider to save it with?

I never added anything to it as saved in other account, we merged it (think it was around £600) with other savings we had for him into a junior ISA when he was around 14 and the money was given to him when he turned 18 and the JISA closed. He has put it into premium bonds and is feeding £4k a year into a LISA for a house deposit (hopefully) when he has finished uni.

We paid into it as welll and now it's in an Isa with £10k for dd

My DDs is with the Halifax. I haven't looked since we moved 6 years ago, but at last look it had lost money!

@BrokenWing I didn't get to choose which bank DDs went into. Halifax is a very odd choice for a Midlands town with no branch.

We added I £50 a month and it’s now worth just over 9k, my DD is just 16, so will have another 2 years of growth to that so hopefully 10k to start her off as an adult.

I had no idea who my sons was with. We got updates but I didn’t take much notice. We never added to it, we saved elsewhere for our kids. On his 18th it was worth £500 ish and he got a letter about what to now but he’s still not got around to sorting it out months later.

That’s a helpful comment @PlutoCritter

There are not many to choose from as they are not widely available from banks. Money Saving Expert has a section on them. If you are going for a straight cash one there is little difference between them.

We tried Beehive to begin with as they had a slightly higher interest rate at the time but they were a nightmare even trying to set up the account (wouldn't take a deposit from ds's adult bank account, Nationwide said there was no reason why not). Lots of messages back and forward in the app and they were no help. So tried with Moneybox instead and it was really easy, all done online in a few minutes.

I was a bit unnerved putting so much cash into an app with a bank I didn't know, but thought as they have the usual FSCS protection up to £85k there was no risk for a cash LISA.

We invested it in one of the recommended things. I can't remember the details but 11 years later that £250 is worth a mind boggling £270.

No idea how people have got so much out of it as we're not financially daft.

Ds's is currently worth £21K down from £26K at its height. We put the child benefit in over the years. Ds sensible and knows it is for uni with maybe £5K left over to start saving towards a house deposit. Very happy with this 'free' money.

I'm another one interested in how you did this - I thought that was illegal.

I didn't invest in ours because I thought I did have to hand it over to them at 18, and was not sure they could be trusted. Now that they are teenagers I am quite glad about this (takeaways for sure!), but if there was a way to keep control of it, I would definitely add more now.

There are three reasons why:

1. Whether or not you added anything to it. Children who now have 15k in a CTF have had substantial additional contributions from family over the years.

2. What your CTF was invested in. You could choose what the CTF was invested in. The Government at the time recommended parents chose equities because over 18 years that gives most potential for growth and there is plenty of time to recover from any losses. If you didn’t choose equities but left it in cash, you would have done much worse because cash interest rates have been negative in real terms for much of the last 18 years. And because banks knew many people didn’t pay much attention or bother shopping around, they were not incentivised to offer competitive interest rates on CTFs.

3. Timing. Kids born in late 2007, just before the financial crisis of 2008, will have been in a far worse position than those whose CTF started investing in equities when the market bottomed out in early 2009. This is one reason why experts recommend regular monthly contributions than sticking in a lump sum in one go.

My DD has just had hers transferred to her bank account.

The 250 is now worth £525!

At least you got something both my kids missed out and got sweet fuck all.

Ungrateful

This is giving me the kick up the bum to check my dc's out! Tbf, we had a load of bad luck/illness etc so haven't been able to add. I let ds1's go into the automatic scheme and moved ds2's into a "green/environmentally friendly" scheme, with the hope we'd all take an interest in how they grow and move again accordingly. But life happened and nothing got done. I'm grateful they'll both have something, but expecting there to be quite a difference in outcome and no idea how to make it fair 🤦‍♀️

It gave us a shove to start saving for dc, it was a struggle to get it set up before it ran out.
But dc have 20k each which will be great for them and it got me saving a small regular amounts for them which I probably would never have done because no one ever did it for me.

We stuck ours for both DD's in specific funds that were recommended at the time. Have only been putting £10 month extra in. Think DD 16 is up to about 5k ish and DD 12 about 2k.
If they get a few grand out of it towards uni or car costs that would be great.

Same, dd1 has it and dd2 does not. Noting I can do but this post has prompted me to find dd1's I'm not even sure how she got it tbh as she wasn't even born in the UK. I remember being surprised to find a letter about it