Friday 12 July 2013

Child Trust Funds

Bryn, born in 2005, was lucky enough to be a 'child of Gordon'. It's ok Geof, you can put your on-line paternity testing kit away. What I mean is, that at the time, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown was giving every new born child £250 to start a trust fund. Now I don't know about you but £250 just for being born seems like quite a good deal. I think we may be losing sight of who actually did the bulk of the hard work in the whole 'being born' process. Just saying.
Anyway, we have tried our best to put away a little each month towards this trust fund but at present he probably has about enough to spend 10 days doing 'Media Studies' at Solihull. (Please contact my legal department for any complaints about the Media Studies/Solihull comment. I know nothing about either of them. They just sounded right.)
At some stage Bryn became aware that there was a modest amount of money somewhere out there with his name on it and asked what it was for. "Well", I explained. "Traditionally it would be for your University expenses, but you may prefer to spend yours on psychotherapy".
If you think about it, putting money away for a person to access at the age of 18 might not be the wisest of moves. Who knows what he might choose to spend it on? We will have very little, if any control over it at that point. I mean what are we going to do if he spends it unwisely? Stop his pocket money? Put him on the naughty step? Send him to bed early? He could end up spending it on crack cocaine, loose women, a flash car or...even worse...an Ipswich Town season ticket!

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