The good thing about the trump account is it helps you build your kids future without having to do much. It invested in the s&p 500 for my kids and is super simple to manage. I highly recommend using it even if you aren’t a fan of the president. My only complaint is that it’s called (the trump accounts) it should have instead been called (future accounts) or something of that nature to help people understand there is no political agenda or anything. Reason for that is because the political scene has been so mentally draining lately but just my thoughts.

This all ALREADY existed, minus the free $1000 to start… but these are just education savings IRAs and they have… literally existed for decades. This WHOLE situation is a NOTHING burger, because WHO CAN AFFORD to put back $50 a month, PER child, EVERY month until they’re 18 years old, CONSISTENTLY and without issue? It’s setup to fail if you don’t have that payment made… not in that you’ll lose any of your invested money, but you won’t reach the maturity rate required possibly to “cash out”‘without a penalty fee’ and the penalties for that… range, which it APPEARS WILL still apply to even THESE accounts. SOME have maturity AGE only, but some have deposit requirements as well to cash out with no penalties. So… JUST make sure you can set aside that money each month for every kid, and remember that it hits $5,000 required annually after a certain age to reach the maturity point. It’s… a big investment, but it IS a good one. The IDEA for it all is sound, actually… but this was just to help Robinhood recover from their losses over GameStop Gate, IF I’M reading the room like I think I am. It’s… also “hypothetical” and you’ll see that word used a lot. KEEP that word in mind… because “assured” and “hypothetical” are NOT at all the same thing.

Beyond the fact that it’s extremely strange that these accounts are managed solely through a phone app and not a standard government website, this app is clearly not ready for roll-out and must have been vibe coded with no debugging or quality testing done before publish. Pretty embarrassing for something supposedly put out by the US Dept of the Treasury. Despite having bare bones functionality, it is riddled with bugs and error messages. I’m giving it 2 stars instead of 1 because I can actually get it to do what I need eventually, sometimes. Sure, everything may work fine for some users if all you want to do is click the activation link for a child in your email - although, even that was problematic for me with two out of my four kids. As soon as you try to do more in the app, like make contributions, it is barely functional. I tried to make a contribution and it allows me to link a bank account (clicking this immediately results in an Error pop-up every time) or link a debit card. Adding debit card works initially but then for every other transaction, like for my other kids, that debit card doesn’t show up as an option and if I try to add it again it says that I can only link one debit card - yet I can’t select it because it doesn’t show up. Workaround was to delete the card in my account setting before each transaction and then reenter it manually for the next transaction. I have about 5% confidence that the recurring weekly contributions I set up will actually execute as I configured them, because when I go to Recurring Contributions, none of them show up there. These are just a few of the many massive bugs with this app that the most basic quality assurance testing would find - how they figured that this was ready to launch at any stage so far is beyond me. It makes me honestly concerned about how competent the folks in charge of this are and whether or not the banking information and the funds are being properly managed.

The idea is a blessing. I wish my parents could have helped me create wealth. We are trying to do that for our kids but have limited resources and at the same time trying to catch up for our own retirement. Bummer that our children don’t qualify for the $1,000. I can only afford to put $100 in at this time, so that won’t do much. I am considering sticking with what we already have started for them to maximize compounding interest since we don’t get the $1,000 in this account. Even though we aren’t able to add much each year, definitely can’t max it out, having more in an account allows you to make more, is what I am learning. How to people make enough to max these accounts out? Also, it is not allowing me to set up an account for my 14 year-old. Not sure what I did incorrectly; probably user error. I called in and was told to resubmit the application; I did, I will stand by to see what happens next.