Kids Finance

What is Kids Finance app?

Kids Finance is a finance education app for kids. Its primary function is a virtual-currency account and uses a virtual currency called KiFi. Don't mistake this with cryptocurrency; it is nothing to do with Bitcoin, Ethereum or any similar currencies.

KiFi is a token currency only used by the app. As a parent, you can choose what a KiFi is worth. This can be flexible. For example, you could give each KiFi a monetary value or set a whole experience, such as a cinema visit, to a defined number of KiFi.

Just as you set the value of the KiFi, you choose how many kids earn. You can allocate them as you see fit, either as a regular income or tie it to chores. Make sure the amount kids can earn reflects the value you have set for KiFi.

One of the most innovative features is that you can set an interest rate for KiFi to help educate kids about the value of saving and the mechanism of interest rates.

What we love about Kids Finance app

Technology has made many things simpler, but money matters more complex. It isn't enough for kids to be able to count notes and coins. As adults, they will likely have to manage debit, credit, and charge cards. An understanding of interest rates and savings is essential.

Aspects of these financial matters feel abstract until they form a part of life, but, ideally, we don't want kids to learn by making mistakes regarding real-world money. With its invention of KiFi and the tools to use it with kids, this app is a great way to link allowances, pocket money, chores, saving, interest rates and more to a kid's life and help them understand the trade-offs and management of them.

Having all of these tools available for free is great for parents. Kids Finance makes their lives simpler, and helps with teaching kids about the full implications of saving. The delayed gratification part of waiting longer for something better is fairly straightforward to explain but getting into interest rates is less so. Kids Finance offers one of the most effective ways of introducing this topic to kids in a real-world way.

What skills does it teach?

Kids Finance lets kids have more control over their money while making it easier for parents to supervise kids' spending and pay an allowance. The pocket money that parents choose to pay could be dependent on kids completing chores.

The app teaches children about saving money, interest, financial responsibility and the importance of contributing to family life.

What age is it appropriate for?

Kids Finance has features that make it useful for kids between the ages of 8 and 16, although this will depend to some extent on each child's willingness to engage with the app. The card functionality may have minimum age requirements, and while you have parental controls, you still need to be confident that your child will be mature enough to handle a payment card.

Is Kids Finance app easy to use?

The app includes a selection of tutorials covering the tasks for which parents and kids would use it, but there is a crucial sticking point. See the What Kids Finance can Improve On section of this review for more details.

How will students benefit?

Learning about financial matters can be a dull and dry experience for kids. Money is just numbers until it starts to impact our lives. Kids Finance app makes it real for kids in a way that can exceed how real-world money works with the amounts they are likely to have. 

Using KiFi and setting the app's interest rates to a noticeable level, kids will learn about the mathematics behind it and the costs/benefit decision of spending versus saving. A real-world bank account won't usually respond quickly or significantly enough for kids to learn from it.

On a day-to-day level, kids can set goals that help keep them motivated as the app shows them their progress towards their rewards. Further encouragement comes from badges awarded by the app to kids as they achieve their goals.

How will parents benefit?

With an increasing number of us only using card payments and an increased reliance on digital purchases, the traditional handover of a few coins or notes each week is not ideal. Parents have to draw the money out; kids might need it converted into digital form when they wish to spend it.

Having KiFi work as an intermediary between kids' savings and real money will save parents administration issues. Parents can take this further by simulating a bank's saving account.

Parents won't want to get into the complexities of calculating interest. Bank accounts at the levels at which most kids save don't pay enough interest to demonstrate the worth of interest and the power of compounding, but the Kids Finance app will calculate and award interest within the levels parents set.

What can Kids Finance app improve on?

The most challenging aspect of the Kids Finance app is that it never explains the overall concept. What is KiFi? How does it translate into real-world money? How would it work with the optional card? While tutorials explain many tasks the user might carry out, there is no overarching explanation.

Working out these answers for this review of Kids Finance was challenging, time consuming, and the answers came only from incidental sources.

For example, confirmation that KiFi is just a convenient way of tracking kids' rewards came from seeing a screenshot where it had a goal that said 'Get a new bike: 400 KiFi. From this point, it became clearer, but a tutorial that explains the app's purpose and how families should use it is sorely needed.

As part of the feedback to this app's review, the developers have indicated that they intend to improve the app's onboarding process.

The lessons in the app that explain about cash, investments, interest rates and other financial matters are not differentiated by their complexity. In particular, kids at the younger end of the target age group are unlikely to know many of the words used to explain some of the more complex ideas.

The lessons ideally need to be expanded into simpler forms if the app is to offer an educational experience to all kids of an age targeted by the app.

How much does Kids Finance app cost?

Kids Finance is free to download and use. There are not subscription options or advertising. The app has the facility to link to a payment card suitable for kids to use with parental safeguarding features. This functionality was not tested as part of this review.

Is Kids Finance app safe to use?

Kids Finance is well made and gives parents the tools to oversee their children's use of money. Used only with the app's KiFi virtual currency, the app has no personal or financial information requirement. Except for its associated payment card offer, Kids Finance has no advertisements.

Overall rating of the app.

Kids Finance is a well-made app that can fulfil a valuable role in kids' financial education.

The main fault with the app is how vaguely it presents its purpose to new users. As a reader of this review, you won't have this problem as we've worked it out and explained it. For anybody without this information, we'd consider this a three-star app, missing out on four stars purely because of the poor onboarding experience. Armed with the knowledge of what KiFi is and how this app works, you can consider this a four-star app, and as it is free to download, you have nothing to lose in trying it with your kids.