Bank of Dad Hats

Bank of Dad is the oldest money joke in the family, and it keeps getting truer. A February 2024 Savings.com survey of 1,001 parents found that half of parents with adult children give them regular financial help, averaging $1,474 a month, close to $18,000 a year. Nearly half of those parents say it hurts their own finances. The joke has a literary pedigree too: David Owen wrote a book called The First National Bank of Dad, and in 2016 a Missouri father went viral for answering his six-year-old's request for a $20 loan with a formal rejection letter from the DAD Savings and Loan, complete with a complaint department. These Bank of Dad hats borrow the bank's own voice and commit to it. The badges name the institution, BANK OF DAD and BANK OF MOM, for whichever parent is the family's cash machine. The sentence designs go further: the account with insufficient funds, the branch that is closed on weekends, the bank too big to fail, the walking ATM, and the household's one-person Federal Reserve. A lowercase line covers the kids who only call when they need a wire transfer. BANK OF DAD INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, the phrase straight out of that viral letter, gets a second colorway. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. They make a Father's Day, birthday or Christmas gift that the kids can buy for the bank they are already drawing on.