Eldest daughter landed a part-time after school job a few weeks back. With this sub 13.5 hour per week job, came a bunch of adult paperwork that I offered to help her with: I-9 immigration form, W-4s (federal and state), full-time student pension exclusion form, direct deposit form. Oh crap. She has no bank account. She has a 529 account and a pair of UTMA investment accounts but she last had a savings account before her mother and I got divorced. There was a fuzzy plan to get her a checking account prior to a class music trip this summer. That fuzzy plan needed clarity pretty darn quick.
My only requirements other than account opening speed were that the checking account had to have no fees and no hoops of X direct deposits and Y debit card withdrawals to jump through to avoid a monthly service charge or get reimbursed for one. Your bank should serve you for parking your money there. Any monthly interest would be nice but not if there needed to be a minimum balance in exchange. Mrs. Dress Pockets (and bonus mom) suggested a brick and mortar bank and I agreed that would be nice but the speed of the Internet won as I didn’t need to drive anywhere with teenager, identification and social security cards in tow. I settled on a Capital One MONEY Teen Checking account.
Mrs. Dress Pockets and I already have numerous individual and joint Capital One bank accounts. I’ve banked there since May 2007 (then savings account APY 4.59%, now APY 0.40%) when a coworker referred me to what was then ING Direct. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 eventually forced ING to sell their United States bank to Capital One in 2012. Capital One has been good to us overall. Zero fees, better than average interest rates, and new this year paychecks arrive up to 2 days before they are scheduled. No predatory account opening or bundling scandals (that I’m aware of). About the only grief we’ve had is difficulty changing Mrs. Dress Pockets’ last name and honestly we haven’t tried more than once. I did close our joint Capital One checking account early this year and moved to a joint Schwab Investor Checking all to avoid a $7 or $11 check reorder fee. Day care and schools oddly consume more paper checks than virtual currency.
Back to the MONEY Teen Checking. The joint (daughter/father) account was opened in under 15 minutes online and showed up in my existing Capital One portal within the hour without any initial funding needed. I could access and print the routing and account numbers for the employment direct deposit form. One phone call to the support line the next day was needed to sort out my daughter’s online access with a cell phone number not registered in her name. A debit card is on its way and can be administratively locked by her or me at any time. The teen mobile app has a feature to allow the teen to split the account into spendable and set aside virtual bubbles of money. Sort of a gimmick but perhaps it’ll work. What are the odds I can get her to set aside 50%? Perhaps 30% is more realistic. You’re so uncool dad.
