If you’re concerned about effectively teaching your child how to intelligently handle money, don’t worry. There’s now an app for that.
“Kiddie Kredit,” a Miami start-up mobile application, can help bridge the gap in children’s credit education and teach them how to handle finances, says founder Evan Leaphart.
Kiddie Kredit app
The 33-year-old Black, serial entrepreneur moved to Miami in 2004 to attend Florida International University. With the app idea lingering in his head for some 10 years, Leaphart made it a reality in 2018. He launched the app in 2019.
Kiddie Kredit is an app designed to teach families the importance of financial literacy. It is a mobile chore-tracking platform that assigns credit value based on the number of chores your child performs. The app’s entire algorithm parallels basic FICO models, so If your child completes chores well and on time, they’re awarded a ‘kredit’ score.
Leaphart said this rewards process is effective because it teaches children how credit works in real-time. The better the child accomplishes daily tasks, the higher their credit score will be.
As a young adult, Leaphart found himself in debt. As he struggled to become financially stable, he wished he had become financially literate and vowed to help families and children learn about the importance of credit.
“When kids start out as young adults, a lot of the time they have a great business idea, but don’t have a good credit score or anything like that to be able to get the resources to start,” he said.
The tech-businessman sought a creative way to teach kids about credit.
Over generations, occupations originally geared toward kids like newspaper delivery and chimney sweeping grew obsolete with the rise of the digital era and increased child-labor regulations.
Leaphart pondered how today’s kids ages four to 12 can get money and considered household chores to be the most common source of income. Furthermore, kids who earn income through chores have an instilled relationship with their employer being their parents or caregivers, and thus gives the parent a role in helping their children become financially literate.
“The easiest way for a child to learn about credit is by experiencing how it works,” said Leaphart.
Kiddie Kredit is a free mobile application that’s been in the App Store since April 2019.
“We’re coming up on a year now,” he said. “We’ve been trying to listen to parents and see what features they need.”
For Leaphart, adding a brand ambassador and a new curriculum was a natural next step for the Kiddie Kredit platform. The innovative creative particularly had his eye on “Mickey Factz,” a Black rapper and fellow creator advocating financial literacy among children.
“When I heard Mickey Factz freestyle on New York’s radio station, Hot97, I was shocked by what I heard,” Leaphart remembered. “He made credit simple for the listener to understand, in a way that was catchy and not preachy or corny.”
Leaphart was drawn in instantly, and fortunately enough, Factz shared the same enthusiasm for Kiddie Kredit as Leaphart had for his artistic abilities.
“I look forward to working with him on building out this project as we look to empower credit conscious families everywhere,” Leaphart exclaimed.
The collaboration is set to utilize the application’s foundation along with Factz’s creative ability to talk about credit and entrepreneurship and get kids and their families engaged and excited to learn about credit.
“As a child, I had no idea about the inner workings of credit. Not until I became an adult, did I realize what kind of financial situation I was in. So, I decided to use my talent to share my knowledge with the world,” Mickey Factz relayed.
“That talent has brought me to Kiddie Kredit. I’m dedicated to ensuring the minds of our future generation will be set by laying the foundation through my various talents and platforms. As a new father, this has become even more important to me.”
In the future, Leaphart envisions and aims to see Kiddie Kredit partner with banks and schools in spreading his financial literacy initiative, but says the core foundation comes from families.
Of the 3,000 application downloads and sign-ups, he says 80% are mothers aged 25 to 49.
“Financial literacy is something that some school systems have just started teaching, but a lot of knowledge about wealth and finances comes from families,” said Leaphart.
And for Black families, he believes it’s fundamental to augment their involvement in their children’s financial literacy.
“If you look at just the generational wealth and how it compares to specific ethnicities, there’s reasons for that,” he said.
“So just trying to find ways to advance that learning curve and then help people create that generational wealth so we can start to see those numbers change is vital.”
