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What Is the Greenlight Card for Kids?

November 5, 2020 | Leave a Comment

If you have kids that are in middle school and high school, you likely feel the need (as I do) to teach them financial common sense.  The hope is that eventually they will be able to move out on their own and be financially responsible.  However, this lesson isn’t quickly learned, and it requires a lot of parental oversight to do it right.  One tool that can help you is the Greenlight Card for kids.

Greenlight Debit Card for Kids

What Is the Greenlight Card for Kids?

The Greenlight Card for kids is a debit card your children can use, but it comes with some amazing parental controls so you can help guide and influence your children in their money habits.

Please note that if your kids have smartphones, there is an app they can use which will show them their balance and chores and allow them to make requests.  However, the Greenlight Card for Kids can be used if kids don’t have smartphones, also.

Features of the Greenlight Card for Kids

This card makes allowances high tech.

Instantly Deposit Money

You can reward your children for chores well done by depositing money in their Greenlight Card.  Within the card app, children can set up different categories such as spend, save, and give.  They can also set up long-term goal categories such as saving for a car.

Parental Benefits

You can help your children manage their money with this helpful card.  You’ll be given real time spending alerts.

Teach your children about interest by giving them interest payments on their savings.  You decide how much you want to give them.

In addition, you can enable the feature that allows them to withdraw money from the ATM and set how much they’re allowed to withdraw.  Or, you can make withdrawing money off limits.

Features for Older Kids

Greenlight Debit Card for Kids

Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

If your teens have jobs, they can have their paycheck automatically deposited to the Greenlight Card for Kids.  The card can also be added to Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Safety Features

Each Greenlight Card is FDIC insured.  In addition, the card blocks your children from spending money for gambling or buying lottery tickets.  They also won’t be able to spend money at places like massage parlors and horse or dog races, and they cannot get cashback from a purchase.  You’ll get an alert if they try.

In addition, parents have the ability to turn the debit card on or off, should they need to.

How Much Does the Greenlight Card Cost?

The first month is free.  After that, you pay $4.99 for debit cards for up to five kids.  Should you need replacement cards, the first replacement cards are free.

Final Thoughts

The Greenlight Card for Kids offers a way to give your children financial independence while also providing parental oversight so you can help guide your children into financial growth.  This tool is an excellent way to exchange money between parents and kids while having features that let your children grow in responsibility as they grow up.

CIT Bank Money Market Account

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Filed Under: Money and Finances, Parenting, Technology Tagged With: Allowance, debit card, money management, teaching children money management

How to Create a Digital Vision Board

October 22, 2020 | Leave a Comment

Digital Vision Board

Have you set goals for yourself?  Would you like to utilize a strategy to make those goals reality more quickly?  If so, a vision board may be just what you need.  Since most Americans are on their electronics most of the day, a digital vision board may be even more helpful.

How to Create a Digital Vision Board

Creating a digital vision board should only take an hour or two, but its impact should influence you for the rest of the year.

Determine Your Goals

The first step is to determine your goals.  What do you want to accomplish over the next 12 months?  What is working successfully in your life that you want to maintain?  What inspires you?

Make a list of seven to ten goals and items in your life that you want to maintain.

Then, it’s time for the fun—actually choosing the images for your vision board.

Choose Your Digital Vision Board Images

The next step is to find images that best visualize what you want to achieve in your life.  For instance, if you want to graduate from college, you may have an image of a woman in a cap and gown posing with her children.  If you want to cook at home more, you may have a picture of a luscious homemade meal or a woman cooking.

Pick at least one picture for each of your goals, though you can pick more if you’d like.

In addition, you may want to add in a few inspiring quotes to keep you motivated throughout the year.

Where to Find Images

When you’re looking for images, the best place to start is Pinterest.  Because there are so many pictures there, you can really find one that speaks to you and is unique to your own goals.  You can also find motivational quotes here.

While you’ll likely find all that you need on Pinterest, if you don’t, you can go to a place like Unsplash and find images there.

Digital Vision Board

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

Remember, you can also use your own personal photos.  If one goal is, “take a family vacation,” use a picture of the family on your last vacation as motivation.

How to Put the Digital Vision Board Together

Finally, to put the digital vision board together, go to Canva.  (It’s free!).  Once you’re in Canva, click on “Create a Design” and choose “Desktop Wallpaper.”

Next, upload all of the photos and quotes that you have chosen.

Click on “Elements” in the side bar and type in “grid.”  Then choose the grid pattern you would like and starting arranging your pictures.

Final Thoughts

For years, athletes have used visualization to help them perform better.  When you visualize something repeatedly, you’re more likely to achieve that goal.

By placing a digital vision board somewhere you will see it repeatedly throughout the day, say on your desktop, you’re subconsciously reinforcing the vision of your future and your likelihood of making that vision a reality.

Read More

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Saving Money While Traveling with Children,

Road Trips with a Young Child

Filed Under: Home and Living, Parenting Blog at KidsAintCheap, Technology Tagged With: digital vision board, goals, Motivation, vision board

Tips to Improve Eye Fatigue from Online School

September 16, 2020 | Leave a Comment

Since March, our kids have been spending MUCH more time in front of the computer.  Some kids are taking synchronous learning via Zoom, which means they are in front of the computer for a full school day, five days a week.  For most people, this is way too much screen time.  If your child is complaining of eye issues, try these tips to improve eye fatigue.

Tips to Improve Eye Fatigue from Online School

Tips to Improve Eye Fatigue from Online School

My 10-year old is homeschooled, but she’s still on the computer much more than she used to be.  She has eight hours of therapy a week online, she’s taking some Outschool classes, and she’s had a bit more screen time than normal thanks to the pandemic.  After a few months of this, she started complaining about her eyes hurting.  Taking these steps, we’ve remedied some of the problem.

Buy Blue Light Filtering Glasses

Probably the best thing we did was buy blue light filtering glasses.  Anytime our daughter has to use the computer, she uses her glasses.  She finds such relief from eye fatigue using these, that she won’t even use the computer if she can’t find them.

Turn Down the Brightness on the Computer

The other thing she did was turn down the brightness on her computer almost all the way.  This helps reduce the amount of light she gets and also reduces eye squinting.

Limit Consecutive Computer Activities

She’s very firm now that she doesn’t want one computer activity after the other.  She repeatedly asks me to schedule her Zoom sessions with at least an hour or two separation so that her eyes have time to rest.  By doing this, along with using the blue light filtering glasses and turning down the brightness of the computer, she’s been able to resolve most of her eye fatigue.

Take Eye Breaks

Of course, we have the luxury of scheduling breaks for her computer activities.  Kids in synchronous online classes don’t get that choice.  If that’s the case for your child, teach them the rule of 20-20-20.  For every 20 minutes staring at the screen, look at an object 20 feet away for 20 seconds.  This gives your eyes the chance to refocus and helps prevent eye fatigue.

Limit Computer Usage

Finally, if you’re able, limit your child’s computer usage.  On the days our daughter uses the computer a lot for therapies and school, we limit her free time on the computer.  (She actually asked to do this.)  Rather than 30 minutes of free computer time, she has 15, or she foregoes it altogether.

See an Eye Doctor

Tips to Improve Eye Fatigue from Online School

Photo by Liam Welch on Unsplash

If you use all of these tips to improve eye fatigue and your child still has issues, consider seeing an eye doctor to make sure the discomfort is not caused by something more serious.

Final Thoughts

Thanks to the pandemic, our lives have changed in ways we couldn’t have imagined a year ago.  Problems creep up like eye fatigue that need remedies.  If your children’s vision is suffering, hopefully these tips to improve eye fatigue from online school will help reduce their discomfort.

Read More

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Why the Pandemic Affected Our School Choice

What You Need to Know to Homeschool Your Child in the Age of COVID

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: eye fatigue, healthy eyes, online school, pandemic

Is Gabb Wireless a Good First Cell Phone?

August 6, 2020 | Leave a Comment

Though we put it off as long as we felt we could, this summer, we decided to get our child a cell phone for his birthday.  We had specific requirements for a cell phone.  Namely, we didn’t want it to have internet access, yet we wanted it to look like the phones his friends use.  We did a lot of research before we finally bought a phone from Gabb Wireless.

Is Gabb Wireless a Good First Cell Phone for Kids?

Features of a Gabb Wireless Cell Phone

While a Gabb Wireless cell phone doesn’t have all the features a typical cell phone has, it does have several important ones:

  • A 5” display,
  • 2 MP front and 5 MP rear camera,
  • 5 mm Earphone Port for headphones,
  • Battery that lasts up to three days,
  • 2GB RAM/16GB ROM,
  • Coverage on a nationwide 4G LTE network, and
  • 12 essential apps including phone, messaging, contacts, camera, video, gallery, calendar, calculator, clock, voice recorder, FM radio, and file manager.

In addition, Gabb Wireless doesn’t require a long-term contract.  You pay month by month (billed on the 15th of the month with payment on the 17th), and you can cancel at any time.

You can go to the Gabb Wireless website to see if coverage is available in your area.

Is Gabb Wireless a Good First Cell Phone?

Honestly, the answer depends on what you’re looking for.  However, there are several reasons why Gabb Wireless is a good first cell phone for our child.

Unlimited Text and Calling

We use Ting for our own cell phone service, so we were pretty sure we didn’t want to add him to our plan.  (With Ting you pay as you use, so you pay for each individual call and text, which we didn’t want to do with a teen.)

Our teen isn’t particularly chatty, but he uses his new Gabb Wireless cell phone a lot.  He is working on a political campaign, and part of his work is calling registered voters for about six to eight hours a week.  That translates to A LOT of cell phone calls.  We’re so glad he has unlimited calling!

He also likes to text his friends, so he uses that feature frequently.

No Internet Access

We specifically wanted a phone that didn’t have internet access and all of the trouble that could potentially go with the internet such as viewing inappropriate content, spending too much time playing games or using social media, or just fueling a cell phone addiction, which is so easy to do.

We wanted our teen to have a cell phone, but we didn’t want to give him too much device that he wouldn’t handle responsibly.  In a few years, he can upgrade to a regular smart phone.

Appearance

If you’ve spent any time looking for cell phones that don’t have internet access, you know that many of them look like relics from 15 years ago.  We really appreciated that the Gabb Wireless cell phone looks like any other regular smart phone.  That was an important feature for our teen.

Low Cost

Our child is forgetful and not the most gentle with his possessions, so we wanted a phone that was reasonably priced.  We bought the cell phone from Gabb Wireless for $69 on sale.  (Sometimes they have sales where the price of the phone goes as low as $49!)

Gabb Wireless has their own network, so we pay approximately $24 a month for the service, but as I mentioned, there is unlimited text and calling.  So, the total outlay between buying the phone and paying for service for a year is $357 ($69 for the phone and $288 for a year of coverage).

Basic Apps

Is Gabb Wireless a Good First Cell Phone for Kids?

Photo by Lance Anderson on Unsplash

The phone does have basic apps and features that our teen enjoys.  He listens to music on his phone when he takes walks, and he uses the alarm feature frequently.

Downsides to the Gabb Wireless as a Good First Cell Phone

If you’re a parent who wants a simpler phone for your kids that keeps away many of the dangers of a traditional smart phone, Gabb Wireless may be a good first cell phone for you.  However, there are definitely some drawbacks to this phone.

No Ability to Track

The majority of smartphones give you the ability to track your child.  You can quickly check and see exactly where they are.  This gives parents reassurance that children are where they’re supposed to be when they say they are.  In the unlikely chance that your child gets kidnapped (or if he simply gets lost), the tracking feature can also help the police find him.

Unfortunately, Gabb Wireless does not have this ability.  For some parents, that alone is a reason to not buy this phone.  I do hope that this is something Gabb Wireless is able to remedy in the future.

Can’t Send or Receive Images

While a Gabb Wireless phone does have a camera, you can’t use the camera to send photos in your texts.  Texts can only send text messages.

I completely understand why Gabb Wireless did this, but still, sometimes this feature can be annoying.  Within the first week of getting his phone, my son was chatting with his aunt who sent over some pictures of her dogs, but my son did not receive the images.  He was a bit embarrassed to tell her that his new phone doesn’t let him view images.

No Way to Monitor Texts

Since there is no Internet on this phone, there is no way to install monitoring software to monitor your child’s texts.  This seems to be a flaw in an otherwise extremely safe phone.  I would hope in future models that Gabb Wireless could address this issue.

Final Thoughts

For our family, Gabb Wireless is a good first cell phone.  It looks like other smart phones with more capabilities, and it offers basic features that are necessary for younger children.  Yet, it takes away one of the greatest sources of addiction as well as mischief—the Internet.

There are some drawbacks to this phone, but overall, Gabb Wireless is the best “safe” cell phone we found on the market.

Filed Under: Growing Up, Money and Finances, Parenting, Safety, Technology Tagged With: cell phone review, kids and cellphones

Choosing Your Kids’ First Cell Phone

June 5, 2019 | Leave a Comment

first cell phone

Cellphones are everywhere and it is common to see kids with their own phones. Since pay phones are obsolete, it can be a great idea to get your child a cellphone so that they can reach you at any time. Especially once they are active in extracurricular activities and building a social life outside the home. How do you choose one? Do you just opt for a smartphone to add to your plan? Before you go the simplest route you can think of, here are some things to consider and options to think about before purchasing a new line.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Technology

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