Teen had access to savings account...

Jami74

Employing sub-contractors is very impressive for a 16 year old. Pity it went wrong for him, imagine if it had gone the other way and he'd replaced the £8k and added a few extra thousand into the account too! That would have been a surprise when you found out.
Find it hard to believe anyone can spend £8k without their family members noticing though. Our family doesn't spend that much a year between us on non-essentials. Is it worth offering to go through the statements with him to check where the money went? Maybe there are subscriptions or memberships that can be cancelled.
Does the mother-in-law need to find out? She opened him an easy access account in his name and deposited a significant amount of money into it.

pjread

£8k sounds like (and is) a lot, but there's some expensive tech out there; you could spend a big chunk of that on a PC (e.g. a NVidia 3090 graphics card is around £1700 alone, and would be a smallish package) so I don't think it's completely insane not to notice things coming in. 

As others are saying, I expect the kid is kicking himself enough that it might be a lifetime positive for him - and at least he's wasted cash he had rather than racked up credit card debt he then can't pay or something. 

[Deleted User]

Yellow_mango said:

As far as I am aware it is not possible to open a bank account (other than a JISA or CTF) for a child to which they have no access. Or indeed set up any account for any other person without their consent. When setting up accounts for my teen sons they had to be part of the process - answer questions themselves, and provide ID etc. The requirements may be lower for children under 13, but the money is still in their name. It honestly seems more likely that your MIL didn't fully understand what the bank was saying than that she was actively misled. 

So are you saying that all the login details and cash card for this new account arrived at your house and your son accessed them and spent the money (which would have had to be transferred from the savings account to the current account prior to spending), all without your knowledge? That alone is quite impressive. My kids needed significant assistance to navigate online banking registration. Did he not even ask why he was getting letters with login details and why there was an account being set up in his name? And why there was loads of money in it? 

That's a bit stereotypical to say that all 16 yo kids don't understand anything to do with online banking. It's like me saying all people over 50 don't know how to work a computer.

niktheguru

Like others have said, its unlikely you can pin anything on the bank regarding your son spending the money.
As others have said you just have to take the positives out of it and hope that your son has learnt some life lessons out of this.

Saying that though, given he sounds like a very computer literate and intelligent person (and a lot of kids are at that age, having knowledge far exceeding most parents with IT) surely it was stressed to him that this money was for the future. If he was present at the "meeting" with the bank he would have known exactly what your MIL wanted done with it.....for him to then "surprisingly" get a new current account and then transfer money from the savings account to the current account and then into a different current account, and then to purchase things without his parents knowing, suggests he full well knew what he was doing! (regardless of how generous he was with his cash) How did you find out he was spending the money in the end?

I echo the sentiments that the money should have probably gone into a fixed rate saver or ISA for him instead. Also, given he is pretty tech savvy, surely he could have been involved with finding a bank which could have done more for the money, also helping him learn the value of money and saving. Opening a natwest account is as good as keeping it at home under the bed most of the time when it comes to savings! 

Anyways, i'm not trying to be rude, these things happen and at least you aren't left out of pocket by this. Hopefully you've all grown closer and learned valuable lessons and it hopefully wont happen again! (And at least he has a better computer!)

24Tweezers

It's unfair to be so hard and righteous towards the OP.  It was with their best intentions they put the money where they did for the child's future.  They weren't to know how things would turn out.  Sure, if they had any inclination that this outcome would happen, they would have invested it some other way, but we are all wise in hindsight.
The OP doesn't need it pointing out to them that 'the money is gone, get over it'.
Let it be a warning for all of us with kids and money.

colsten

24Tweezers said:

It's unfair to be so hard and righteous towards the OP.  It was with their best intentions they put the money where they did for the child's future.  They weren't to know how things would turn out.  Sure, if they had any inclination that this outcome would happen, they would have invested it some other way, but we are all wise in hindsight.
The OP doesn't need it pointing out to them that 'the money is gone, get over it'.
Let it be a warning for all of us with kids and money.

One lesson the adults involved in this should have learnt from the episode is that you never just go to one bank for advice. Ideally, you don't ask any bank at all if you want to work out what to do with your money. Banks don't give advice, they will simply sell you the products they have available. Details about all their products are freely available on the Internet, and independent advice is freely available.

In the end, however, it's the adults who made the decision which products they bought.