Account ownership: Parents or Scouts?

Community,

I would like to get the opinions of others in the community on who you suggest whose name a “scout account” should be in? Should it be in the name of the scout or the name of the parent? I think there can be multiple pros and cons. Here are some things that come to mind for me.

Scout’s name:

  • If we put the account in the name of the scout. It might complicate things a bit when there are multiple scouts in a family. For example, if a parent wants to use a credit card to deposit an amount in the account, they pay the $0.55 fee for a deposit to each kids account
  • One benefit is if the scout does something in the Troop to “earn” money, it can be deposited into HIS account. In my Troop’s case however, we rarely credit scouts with personal funds and I am not sure what the scout would even use the funds for except perhaps another trip. So I don’t see this as a huge incentive to this approach.

Parent’s name

  • This seems like the simpler approach. One account for the whole family. The parent deposits to only one account and if they have multiple scouts, the parent doesn’t have to keep track of multiple balances.
  • But what happens with blended and/or divorced families. How would this work? I can guess there may be a host of problems from this. But I don’t know what I don’t know. What have others experienced?

What does your Troop do and why did they do it?

Any additional pros or cons would be appreciated.

Thanks again to all for your help.

Ideally, individual scout or parent should have an account for purpose of proper book keeping. For parent(s) who may want to manage multiple scouts, the parent should have the ability to manage money of multiple money accounts. This will gives greatest flexibility to any variety of family structure. Fund can easily be transferred by parents across any accounts.