Birthdays and Banking While at Home

By CapFed
April 22, 2020

Guest Author: Marcy S. is a parent to 3 teenagers, all of which had birthdays recently while stay-at-home orders were in place. After the celebration, her kids had to figure out how to cash their birthday money and then purchase a birthday gift. She works in the Marketing Department at Capitol Federal®.

Birthdays during COVID-19.

Like many others, my family is adjusting from busy days at work, school, soccer practice and band concerts to essentially doing everything at home. And I mean everything!

Birthdays are special and certainly deserve a celebration – especially for kids. However, because of the recent social distancing guidelines, families across the country are getting creative in how they celebrate. I’ve seen parents bake homemade birthday cakes, set up drive-by birthday parades, invite friends to Zoom parties and even set up birthday wishes in their front yards. It’s a strange time to celebrate a birthday, for sure, but as long as we are making our kids feel special, I think we are doing okay.

In our family, we have three kids with March and April birthdays. When it came to gifts this year, cash was king – or I should say checks. With everyone following the safer-at-home directives, checks from relatives began appearing in our mail box in lieu of traditional gifts. This was unforeseen, but certainly made for a good opportunity to talk to my teenagers about “old school” checks and how we can deposit those funds at home.

Here are the 3 lessons my kids learned:

Mobile Check Deposit – Once my kids become adults, they may never see a check again. But for now, this is how we deposited money from their birthday checks into their account. Once we logged into the Capitol Federal® Mobile Banking app, we selected the deposit option and took a picture of the check. We just followed the instructions on the screen. There was information we had to write on the back of the check, so make sure you pay attention to that detail. CapFed® sends you an email once your deposit has been approved. It was easy and didn’t cost us anything.

Making Purchases Online – Once the funds were available, my kids, of course, wanted to use their birthday money to buy things. They went online to shop (probably when they should have been doing schoolwork, but some fights aren’t worth having these days.) They found what they wanted, and I made sure it was from a reputable site. We used PayPal at checkout which allowed me to use my True Blue® Direct debit card without providing my card number to each online retailer - it all went through PayPal. Other tools, such as Apple Pay®, offer similar services. This was also super easy.

Account to Account Transfers – And finally, since I had used my personal debit card to purchase their items online, they had to “pay me” by transferring money from their account into mine. Using True Blue Online® banking, we transferred money directly from one account to another in seconds – all for free!

And just like that, we had successfully celebrated their birthdays, and they were able to pick out gifts they wanted online. All of this accomplished from home. This may not be the birthday they had in mind, but I like to think it is definitely one they will remember and talk about for years to come. “Hey mom, remember that one year…”

How have your celebrations changed right now? Have you seen more checks show up for birthdays?

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Categories: Just For Fun , Money Smart Kids , Smart Spending , Your Home
Tags: About CapFed , Debit Cards , Kansas City , Lawrence , Wichita , Topeka

Birthdays and Banking While at Home

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