In these days of COVID, many bank services are not as easy as before. We are trying to open a bank account for my son. All we wanted to do was open a Kids Savings account, that would give him a bank access card too.
Our family has done allowances this way for a long time. We automate the money going to the child, as a weekly deposit to a no fee TD bank account. This method worked well with my daughters.
My son, being on the autism spectrum, we weren’t sure how this would work. Happily he has asked about banking and wishes to have an allowance, so we are now trying to open a bank account for him.
For Tangerine, you have two options:
- For a kid who is less than 16 years old you can open a straight savings account. This can be done over the phone. We didn’t want to use this because it would not include a bank access card.
- For a student 16 years and older they have a student chequing account. This comes with a bank card, however, my son is not old enough and he does not need chequing capabilities, yet. This is done on-line.
We decided we were going to try to create a TD Kids Savings account. I called Easyline and was told this can only be done at a bank branch face-to-face. This is how we did it for my daughters. I was hoping we could do this on-line or over the phone, but no, this is not possible.
To book a face-to-face meeting with our local branch, takes at least 2 weeks, thanks to COVID. All bank branches are running with smaller staffs, and they are not open for as long. Banks are closed on Sundays, during the pandemic.
I had to wait 2 weeks to open my son’s bank account. Patience is not something my son has mastered yet, so there was a lot of nagging on his part about his bank account.
Epilogue
Finally managed to set up the account, but a few interesting new wrinkles.
- The account is a TD bank account. This type of account no longer is automatically on my Easyweb. Previously all my older kids’ accounts were visible.
- Still a lot of “paper” work. The amount of physical paper in the banking system must make Domtar proud.
Addendum
A few folks have asked, I had to have 2 pieces of identification for my son. In our case we used a valid passport and his birth certificate.
Wow. I am surprised that the process took so long. I recently ran across an app called Greenlight (don’t worry, I am not affiliated with them by any means — just figure it’s relevant to the content here). They also specialize in this concept of debit cards for kids. It might be worth a shot.
In any case, I’m glad you got it all sorted — even with all the paperwork involved 🙂