National, February 23, 2023: To ensure that parents can make smarter choices and save more while spending for their kids, especially for recurring expenses, Multiply – the world’s 1st Invest to Spend app – has launched the Parenting category on the app.
Having a child is a delightful experience. It is also one that comes with a lot of responsibilities – managing finances being one of the primary concerns. Everyone wants their kids to get the best facilities, education, and extracurricular activities so that they grow up to be successful participants in society.
However, financial planning for children remains restricted to age-old financial instruments such as bank savings, fixed deposits, and long-term insurance plans.
These plans and instruments often do not benchmark the rising education and miscellaneous costs and could end up being inadequate the meet expenses when the child grows up. Huge educational loans, families getting deeper into the debt cycle, and similar stories are very familiar.
In fact, the concept of financial planning for anything except college funds is practically non-existent. With annual school fees rising to up to Rs 2 lacs in tier 1 cities, this is a huge expense that a parent has to partake in every year. However, it’s not an effectively planned expense for most parents.
When a baby is born, parents make purchases anywhere between Rs 10000 – 30000 month on month, meeting the needs of baby products such as diapers, cribs, clothes, skincare, stroller, car seats, and more. But most parents do not plan for these expenses and rely on their bank savings to spend for them, without realizing that they could have saved much more had they gone the smarter way.
Multiply’s parenting category launch aims at solving this problem.
They have partnered with popular kids-first brands such as FirstCry, Hamleys, Vendatu, and StayQrious. Moreover, other popular brands such as Decathlon, Myntra, Flipkart, Nike, Puma, etc. also feature in this category from where parents usually purchase for their kids.
Multiple users, aka Multiplers, can plan for their kid’s expenses 3-12 months in advance, and earn investment returns on their savings. Moreover, the brands mentioned provide 3% – 25% additional savings in the form of co-investments. Overall, a parent saves big time while they have already planned for these inevitable spends.
Talking about the initiative, Paddy Raghavan, the CEO, and co-founder, of Multiple, said,
“Youngsters look at saving for vacations and gadget purchases. However, as one grows older, their priorities may change, and be more focused on their regular expense-based lifestyle, a big part of which includes their children’s education and other expenses.”
He added, “The new category on Multiply is launched with the purpose of helping parents become more prudent while spending for their children. It ensures that young parents do not fall into a debt trap and are able to build positive savings behavior. We will be adding many more relevant and exciting brands to this category to make it exciting for the parents.”
To further strengthen this category, Multiply has done a strategic partnership with iMumz – a platform to empower pregnant mothers to deliver healthy, happy, and intelligent babies through a positive lifestyle. The goal of this partnership is to help mothers (and parents) plan for a change in their lifestyle once their baby is born.
iMumz CEO and Founder Ravi Teja Akondi said, “Multiply and iMumz sync perfectly as we both have a clear purpose of helping young parents in all aspects of parenthood. While iMumz provides the necessary lifestyle guidance to unlock the true potential of the newly born, Multipl enables parents financially to achieve the same thing. We’re very excited about this partnership.”
