by Erika Jonsson Pete Lockyer and his wife Kristie always planned to invest for their kids.
“When each of my brothers and I were born, my grandad put some money in a savings account in the UK,” Pete says. “Each Christmas and birthday he would top it up, and we found out about it when we reached adulthood.
“That idea of doing something from a very young age was instilled in me through that experience.”
Pete started to put away money he earned through freelance graphic design work, to work towards a $10,000 starting balance with Six Park.
“Then my nan passed away in January 2017 and my dad was sole beneficiary and shared his inheritance with my brothers and I as well as his grandchildren. That amount brought us to the amount we needed to open a Six Park account for our daughter, Phoebe.”
The account is held in Kristie’s name on behalf of Phoebe, with the funds then able to be legally transferred when she turns 18.
“It’s a comfortable thing, knowing that there’s something there for her that we can provide should she need it. It’s not something we need to think about, it’s just set aside and it’s there for her – it’s completely removed,” Kristie says.
In September 2019 the couple’s son Jack was born. Pete and Kristie also worked towards setting up a Six Park account for him with a $10,000 balance by the time he was two years old.
“With Phoebe, we worked towards achieving the $10,000 minimum balance by putting money in a high interest savings account,” explains Pete. “With Jack, interest rates were so low that we chose an alternative method to reaching $10,000. Fortunately at the same time Six Park had expanded their offering to allow accounts with a minimum balance of $5000, so we opened an account for Jack when he was ten months old.
“Over the course of the next 14 months, this balance had grown significantly, so that by his second birthday we were able to top up his balance to $10,000.”
The couple don’t know when they will tell their children about their investment funds, but agree it’s comforting to see the balances growing for their futures.
“We make small regular contributions and have set up dividend reinvestment plans for both accounts,” Pete says.. “My mum’s quite sweet – she saves all her 50p coins for her grandkids in England, so she also makes little donations into Phoebe’s account as well.”
Pete and Kristie don’t have a clear end in mind for the money, but hope it will set their children up well in life.
“One obvious use might be a house deposit – who knows what challenges we’ll be facing in 20 years and whether the property market will be as difficult as it is to get into now. My parents owned their own home in their 20s – we’re in our 40s and still don’t own our own home,” Pete says.
“We hope it will give our kids a good start for whatever they want to do in life. Hopefully they’ll have a good financial philosophy at that time. For now we’re happy keeping it quiet and chipping away at it. It’s a circle of life type thing – we benefited from my parents’ and grandparents’ foresight and our children will benefit from this, and hopefully do the same thing for their kids and grandkids one day.”
Pete says investing is a bit like parenting: “You only see little snippets of what you’re doing at the time; it won’t be until later that you see the whole picture.
“There’s a sense of satisfaction each time we put a bit of money into the account or see dividends coming in – it’s quite rewarding.”
Pete and Kristie met through the triathlon circuit in 2007 and married in 2012. In 2014, their daughter Lily was born prematurely at 23 weeks and passed away after a day.
“We started the Lilyroo Fund as a legacy for her, and Phoebe was born just over a year later. In the same way that we contribute to Phoebe and Jack’s future, we still do stuff for Lily as well – we contribute at birthdays and Christmas to her fund.”
To date, the Lilyroo Fund has raised more than $220,000 for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital Foundation.
Pete says it gives him peace of mind to know that Phoebe and Jack have “wise minds” looking after their financial future.
“None of my parents or grandparents are affluent – this money was built over a long, long period of time. There was always a sense of duty to use that money in a really constructive way. The fact that Six Park is the vehicle for us says a lot about what that means to us because that’s their inheritance and their future and we’ve put that in Six Park’s hands.”
Kristie is one of four children and says her parents worked hard to provide what they needed on a day-to-day level without being able to save for the future.
“It taught me you have to work hard for your money. I always knew that whatever they’d given me, they’d worked hard for it. My dad travelled to work, he would work out of town during the week, and my mum worked two jobs and would come home from night shift to make our lunches, drop us off at school then go to bed before going back to work in the afternoon.
“I got a job as a teenager so that I could provide for myself and do things that I wanted to do, but there was no saving. So I’m happy for Phoebe and Jack that we can do this for them to help them in the future.”