The best festive saving choices for children

Premium bond, pension, Junior Isa - or something else completely? Which is the best way to save for your child's future? Merryn Somerset Webb weighs the choices facing parents today.

A press release arrives. "Give the Christmas gift children really want," it says. "Money." Apparently some 64% of children aged 8 to 16 say that they would prefer to have money to an actual gift this year. Why? "They want to be able to get what they want rather than be surprised." How's that for lack of festive spirit?

The press release comes from an organisation called PKTMNY, which styles itself as a facilitator of "pocket money for the digital age" (seethis week's cover story for more on digital money) and so provides pre-paid Visa cards for children that parents can top up for them to use.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.