Max’s Mite – a small boy’s big gift

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Max with his savings jars
Max with his saving jars.

Meet five-year-old Max McQueen, one of our newest and youngest supporters.

He recently gave $11 to our emergency appeal for India’s COVID second wave. When we called up to thank him, his parents gave us a bit more of the story behind his donation.

“We use a system of saving with Max that we got from the Barefoot Investor [a popular Australian book about money management]. Max splits his pocket money between three jars labelled ‘smile’, ‘spend’ and ‘give’.

“The smile jar is to save up for something special, the spend jar is just for day-to-day things and the give jar is for sharing with those less fortunate than us.

“He gets five dollars a week, if he does all his chores, and he divvies it up evenly between the jars. So that $11 would’ve taken him about six weeks to save up.”

And how did he decide to give it to our emergency appeal?

“He definitely got the idea from the news. He’d seen the reports about the second wave in India and it really stuck with him. Then one day he came to us and said that he wanted to give it to people in India. He said that he’d heard ‘they had no money and needed vaccines so they could go back to work’.

“We’d seen an email about your emergency appeal and so we showed him that and he was so excited. It was lovely to see him so excited to be sharing with others.”

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