Few things make adults shake their heads more than watching a freshly minted honor roll-level student graduate from high school and not know how to save money, or even how to balance a checking account.
A Rochester Hills-based start-up plans to help parents teach those sorts of simple financial lessons to their kids before they even get into secondary school. Jeff Eusebio and Bob Masterson came up with the idea for FamilyMint.com after realizing their kids had more money than they knew what to do with and no clue on how to manage it.
"They wanted to spend all of it all of the time," Eusebio says. "They didn't know what they had and we didn't know either. We thought there had to be something better than an Excel spreadsheet."
So they started building FamilyMint.com last May. The idea was to create an online money-management system for kids where the parents serve as the bank. That means the kids figure out what they can do with the money they have and then go to mom and dad when they want to make a withdrawal.
The company is keeping Eusebio and Masterson busy and letting them farm some work out to local firms specializing in public relations and web development. They just rolled out a public alpha version of the site and hope to debut the Beta version in May.
The goal is to reach 10,000 users in 2010 and hopefully add a few employees as the company grows.
Source: Jeff Eusebio and Bob Masterson, partners with FamilyMint.com
Writer: Jon Zemke
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