A Stranger Put $250 in My Kid’s Account. Twice

Résumé détaillé

Here is the part parents need to understand: Auto-enrolled is not the same as active. A parent or guardian has to claim and activate the account, through IRS Form 4547 or at…

The notification said $250 had been deposited into my child's Trump account.

I did not know a Frank Bisignano. I had never met a Frank Bisignano. As far as I could tell, nobody in my family had either. But there was his name, attached to real money, sitting in an account with my child's name on it.

Frank Bisignano, it turns out, spent his career running some of the largest payments companies in the country. He now runs the IRS. And according to a CNBC article I found, he had taken his own money, run it through his family fund and given $250 to every child between the ages of 2 and 8 in the ZIP code where he grew up.

That ZIP code is the one I live in now. My child got the money because of where we live, and because a man who left this neighborhood a long time ago never forgot it.

Then it hit me. This was the second time someone I didn’t know had put money in my child’s account. Several months earlier, the same thing had happened through Michael Dell's program.

Two men who have never met my family, who will probably never know my child's name, put money into an account for him. It will sit there, invested, until he turns 18.

Trump Accounts are new. Any child under 18 with a social security number can have one. The money goes into a diversified, low-cost index fund, basically the broad stock market, and it cannot be touched until the child turns 18, when it becomes an IRA in the young adult's own name. Children born from 2025 through 2028 also get a one-time $1,000 contribution from the Treasury. More than 60 million children have been auto-enrolled.

Here is the part parents need to understand: Auto-enrolled is not the same as active. A parent or guardian has to claim and activate the account, through IRS Form 4547 or at trumpaccounts.gov, and the $1,000 for newborns has to be elected. It does not happen just because the account exists.

That means this money will only reach the children whose parents take one administrative step. I took it.

Début de l'article, extrait de Newsweek. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.