Providing investment education and experience for your child can help you teach them valuable money-handling skills and give them a head start in financial freedom as they enter adulthood. 

To deliver financial lessons more easily, you can rely on investing apps for kids that make investing fun, engaging, and educational. Below, we’ve compiled the top five kids’ investing apps currently on the market and the features to look out for when choosing the best app for your child.

Why Should Children Learn About Investing?

Teaching your child about investing helps them grasp important concepts like the value of budgeting, risk and reward, saving, and money management. By giving them the freedom to invest, you can help your child learn how to be accountable for where and how they choose to spend their money. 

Another benefit lies in the long-term profits your child can make. As their investments grow, they can enter their educational and work lives with more financial stability.

Unfortunately, a child younger than 18 (or 21 in some states) can’t start investing directly. However, as their parent or guardian, you can teach them the basics of investment and allow them to invest in a controlled manner via a kids’ investment app.

What Are the Best Investment Apps for Kids?

The following table rounds up the top five kids’ investing apps based on their ratings on the App Store:

Investing App	App Store Rating
Greenlight	4.8 (392k reviews)
Acorns Invest	4.7 (897k reviews)
Fidelity	4.8 (2.3M reviews)
Stockpile	4.7 (56.2k reviews)
EarlyBird	4.7 (548 reviews)

Let’s take a look at what each of these apps has to offer.

Greenlight

Greenlight is one of the best-rated kids’ investing apps for good reason. While many investment apps are built for adults with extra features for children and teens, Greenlight is specifically geared toward children. You can get started with Greenlight with a free trial and pay a small monthly fee of $4.99 once it ends.

Here’s what Greenlight offers:

• Prepaid debit card—Your child gets a prepaid debit card that they can use to make in-store purchases, and you can control a list of allowed stores 
• Spending monitoring—You’re notified when, where, and how much your child spends
• Custodial account—You can open a custodial account so your child can invest in stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with your approval. The assets in a custodial account will get transferred to your child once they turn 18 (or 21)

Greenlight also offers educational materials and resources you can use to teach your child how to handle money well. Other features include savings, cash back, chores, and allowance tracking.

Acorns

Acorns is an investing app with automation features, making investing straightforward for children. Here’s a look at some of Acorns’ top features:

• Round-Ups—This feature rounds up purchases made on linked credit and debit cards to the nearest dollar, automatically investing the difference on your child’s behalf. This is a great way to teach your child that every dollar matters and investments can add up over time no matter how small they are
• Recurring Investments—Your child can choose a fixed amount (starting at as little as $1) to automatically invest every day, week, or month to grow their portfolio consistently 
• Sending/receiving gifts—Relatives and friends can contribute to your child’s investments by gifting an amount through a custom link you generate

To get started with Acorns, you need to pay a $5 monthly fee for the Acorns Early account, which is designed for teens under 18.

Fidelity

If your child is older and mature enough to be trusted with their own financial decisions, Fidelity is a good kids’ investment app to try out.

The app allows you to open a Fidelity Youth Account on behalf of your children. This is a brokerage account rather than a custodial one, which means the child is the owner of the account, and every investment is their property and not the parent’s. 

This is a good investment app for teenagers who have some prior investment experience. It allows your child to invest, save money, and manage their finances from one unified platform. 

Stockpile

Stockpile is considered one of the best investing apps for beginners because it mainly focuses on a single investment option—stock market investing. Here’s a quick look at some of Stockpile’s best features: 

• 3,000+ stocks to invest in
• Requires parental approval for investments
• Costs only $4.95 a month for one adult and up to five children
• No minimums and no gift card/funding fees

Stockpile is a good app for children because of the supervision options it offers to parents. Children registered under custodial accounts must get their investments approved by their parents, which helps you keep track of your child’s finances.

EarlyBird

EarlyBird is an investment app made with families in mind. The app boasts a user base of 70,000+ families and makes it incredibly easy for your child to get started with investing and broadening their financial education. It lets you create a digital time capsule for your child where you can store their milestones and achievements and capture and share special memories with your child, turning investing into a fun family activity. The app also lets friends and family gift money to your child, which can then be invested in their financial future.

Here’s what you get:

• A custodial investment account—You’ll manage a tax-advantaged Unifrom Gifts to Minors Act (UGMA) account for your child until they turn 18 (or 21)
• Automatically managed portfolio design—Depending on your goal, the app offers five portfolio designs: high growth, growth, balanced, moderately conservative, and conservative. Growth designs have high risk but offer the potential for greater rewards, while conservative designs have low risk but can promise stable returns
• Automatically diversified investments—The investments your child makes will be distributed across different industries and asset classes
• Estimated investment value—You can see predictions of how much your child’s investments will be worth once they turn 18

EarlyBird charges a monthly fee of only $1 after you exceed your first allocated limit of $200 under asset management.

Features To Look For in Investment Apps for Kids

When deciding which app to choose, here are the aspects to consider:

1. Low fees
2. The ability to view performance history
3. Ease of use
4. Diversification options

Low Fees

A low investment fee is a good feature to have in an investment app for your child since brokerage or management fees can eat into investment returns. This can reduce the amount of money your child makes and discourage them from investing.

Even a minor difference in investment fees can significantly alter long-term profits, so make sure to weigh your options and opt for an investment app with low-cost options.

Performance History

Performance history is a good metric for how trustworthy a particular investment is. When choosing a kids’ investing app, make sure it has features to track investment performance history over a certain period of time. This will help your child gain better insight into their investments and learn how to make better investing decisions in the future.

Ease of Use

A kids’ investing app should be noticeably easier to use than one meant for adults or experienced investors. It should not only allow your child to easily invest and manage their portfolio but also make it easier for you to supervise their spending.

Diversification Options

Diversification is an important principle of investing, and it means spreading investments across different types of industries and assets. When you distribute the risk in this way, the performance of one investment won’t significantly impact your child’s overall portfolio.

Make sure the kids’ investment app you opt for offers diversification features to reduce the chances of your child’s investment endeavors failing in order to keep them motivated.

As your child learns about important concepts like diversification, one way to diversify the money you invest into their financial future is to put some funds into helping them build credit. 

A good credit profile will help them at every stage of life, from securing favorable home loan terms to getting student loans and making college funding easier. To make these goals attainable for your child and set them up for financial success, you can rely on a credit building platform like FreeKick.

FreeKick—A Single Platform for Credit Building and Identity Protection

An impressive investment portfolio won’t help your child much unless it’s accompanied by a solid credit profile. That’s where FreeKick comes in. FreeKick is an FDIC-insured deposit account powered by Austin Capital Bank that helps you build credit for your child and protect their identity.

Building a Credit Profile for Your Child With FreeKick

FreeKick’s credit building service is aimed at children and young adults between 13 and 25 years of age. It’s a great way to help your child establish a credit history early in life via three simple steps:

1. Create an Account—Create an account on FreeKick.bank and choose a deposit that suits your budget
2. Set It and Forget It—Once you activate the account, FreeKick will start building 12 months’ worth of credit history for your children
3. Keep Growing—After 12 months, you can close the account without any fees or continue building credit for your child for another year

As a result, your children get a credit history head start of up to five years when they become adults. This translates into $200,000 saved during their lifetimes due to the more favorable loan terms they’ll be able to get.

Protecting Your Child’s Identity With FreeKick

Securing your child’s identity is an important part of helping them build a good credit profile, making identity protection a worthy investment. Research shows that child identity theft happens every 30 seconds.

To help you ensure your child’s identity is protected, FreeKick offers the following services:

Services for Minors	Services for Adult Children and Parents
Credit profile monitoring Social Security number (SSN) monitoring Dark web monitoring for children’s personal information Up to $1 million identity theft insurance Full-service white-glove concierge credit restoration Sex offender monitoring—based on sponsor parent’s address	Credit profile monitoring SSN monitoring Dark web monitoring for personal information Up to $1 million identity theft insurance Full-service white-glove concierge credit restoration Lost wallet protection Court records monitoring Change of address monitoring Non-credit (Payday) loan monitoring Free FICO® Score monthly FICO® Score factors Experian credit report monthly

FreeKick Pricing

FreeKick has two pricing plans:

FDIC-Insured Deposit	Annual Fee
$3,000	$0 (Free)
No deposit	$149

Both plans include:

1. Credit building for six children aged 13 to 25
2. Identity protection for two parents and six children aged 0 to 25

In addition to an impressive investment portfolio, make sure your child has a solid credit profile and a secure identity—sign up for FreeKick today.