The Worst Financial Gifts to Give Your Kids

September 16, 2023  The White Coat Investor

Parents with fantastic intentions often hurt their children by giving terrible financial gifts. Here's how to change that.

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As a general rule, parents love their kids and would do anything for them. However, due to a lack of financial literacy, many parents with fantastic intentions end up hurting their children. Here are some of the ways they do that.

#1 A Car

I'm sure there are people who think it is a bad idea to give your kid a car because it will spoil them. That's not what I'm talking about. If you really want to spoil them, knock yourself out (actually we'll get to this under #6).

What I am talking about is giving your kid a car that isn't yet paid for. Yeah, some people do this. Can you believe it? They go down to the dealership, put down a $300 down payment, sign up for some loan payments, and then get the car for their kid. Along with the responsibility to make the payments! Uhhh . . . thanks, Mom. I guess it could be worse. They could have signed you up for a lease.

#2 Whole Life Insurance

Another common situation is a parent who bought their kid a whole life insurance policy at birth. It would stand to reason that if you're buying baby food and life insurance from the same company, one of the two probably isn't a very good product.

Despite that, I keep running into people in their 20s and 30s who have just been given a whole life insurance policy and asked to take over the payments. Their parents have been making monthly payments on these for 2-3 decades, but the surrender value is only a four-figure amount at this point and the child is basically being asked to pay a two- or three-figure amount every month for the rest of their life.

It wasn't a good policy to start with. It doesn't address any financial need they actually have (because the face value is usually something like $20,000). And now they have no idea what to do with it, so they just start making the payments too!

Incidentally, what they should do is surrender it; put the money toward their student loans; thank their parents for their kind gift; and never, ever run the numbers on how much that gift could have been had it been invested aggressively in a 529.

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