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By Steven M. Weinstock
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The notification said $250 had been deposited into my child's Trump account.
It also said who sent it: Frank Bisignano.
I did not know a Frank Bisignano. I had never met a Frank Bisignano. As far as I could tell, nobody in my family had either. But there was his name, attached to real money, sitting in an account with my child's name on it.
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So I did what anyone does. I Googled him.
Frank Bisignano, it turns out, spent his career running some of the largest payments companies in the country. He now runs the IRS. And according to a CNBC article I found, he had taken his own money, run it through his family fund and given $250 to every child between the ages of 2 and 8 in the ZIP code where he grew up.
...
That ZIP code is the one I live in now. My child got the money because of where we live, and because a man who left this neighborhood a long time ago never forgot it.
Then it hit me. This was the second time someone I didn’t know had put money in my child’s account. Several months earlier, the same thing had happened through Michael Dell's program.
Two men who have never met my family, who will probably never know my child's name, put money into an account for him. It will sit there, invested, until he turns 18.
Trump Accounts are new. Any child under 18 with a social security number can have one. The money goes into a diversified, low-cost index fund, basically the broad stock market, and it cannot be touched until the child turns 18, when it becomes an IRA in the young adult's own name. Children born from 2025 through 2028 also get a one-time $1,000 contribution from the Treasury. More than 60 million children have been auto-enrolled.
Here is the part parents need to understand: Auto-enrolled is not the same as active. A parent or guardian has to claim and activate the account, through IRS Form 4547 or at trumpaccounts.gov, and the $1,000 for newborns has to be elected. It does not happen just because the account exists.
That means this money will only reach the children whose parents take one administrative step. I took it. And ever since, I have been telling every parent I know to take it too, because the families least likely to hear about the activation step are the ones whose children would benefit from it most.
Run the numbers on my own child. Two gifts of $250. Five hundred dollars, deposited before he is old enough to read the balance. At the stock market's long-run average return, that is roughly $1,200 by his 18th birthday, without anyone adding a cent. Left untouched after that, it is tens of thousands of dollars by the time he retires. Two strangers may have quietly funded a real piece of his old age for less than the cost of a nice dinner out. There is no middleman here, no institution deciding who deserves what. The money goes straight into individual accounts, the same amount for everyone, and then it does the one thing money rarely gets the chance to do for a young child. It waits, and it grows.
But the detail I cannot put down is the ZIP code.
Brad Gerstner, one of the architects of these accounts, committed about $35 million to children across his home state of Indiana. Bisignano did it for one ZIP code, the one that raised him.
You do not need to be a billionaire to play this game at the local level. Picture someone who dies with $10 million and no heirs. Instead of leaving it to institutions that may or may not spend it the way he would have wanted, he could fund an account for every young child in the ZIP code where he grew up, and change the starting line for an entire neighborhood's next generation.
Everyone came from a ZIP code.
The question this program asks every successful person in America is a simple one. Which ZIP code would you pick?
Steven M. Weinstock is the founder of WE Capital and host of The Wealth Clock podcast.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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