You then don need to face the hassle of filling in self assessment forms and paying all the benefit back as a tax charge this is known as opting out. This means that even if your household income makes you ineligible for Child Benefit, You can still sign up and choose not to receive the payments. Registering for Child Benefit also means the child is allocated a National Insurance number easily at age 16. Those whose income means they won actually end up receiving any Child Benefit because it is all taken away in tax are still asked to put in a claim as it means they get National Insurance (ni) Credits from the direction a State Pension. Update: Turn out my kid no longer has has 18 Silly Bandz.Child Benefit claimants warned of new tax probe that can lead to huge fines Creating two fads – one for little kids and one for Yuppies – out of glorified rubber bands is kind of impressive when you stop and consider it.Īny more insight on how fads and crazes get started and hit a tipping point? Better yet, any predictions on what the next fad will be? I’d love to know about it Interestingly enough, the importer of Silly Bandz happens to be the importer of the LiveStrong bracelets – which turned into a somewhat analogous craze among adultsįour or five years back. Kid my kid traded with begs his mom to go buy 12 more Silly Bandz. And then, in what must give Silly Bandz executives warm tingles, the On the bus, and he can trade one of his rare snake-shaped Silly Bandz for three of the easy-to-be-had car-shaped Silly Bandz. And what’s more, some shapes are much harder to come by than others. While they have no real value, they have enormous perceived value.Īnd kids collect them. They trade them, which makes them like money. Having more of them is like some kind of tribal expression of superiority.Ĭlearly the kid with 109 Silly Bandz is 4.73 times cooler than the kid with 23 Silly Bandz. They wear them – scores of them, sometimes hundreds of them – up their little arms.
Today, they are sold in at least 8,000 stores around the country, as well as online.Īnother interesting point on Silly Bandz which might point more to master plan and less to accident: go to their web site, and this is what they’ll tell say should do with these products: From there, they spread up theĮast Coast. While conventional wisdom would have you thinking that fads and crazesĪre hatched in places like LA and New York, this particular craze caught fire in Birmingham, Alabama, which is where Silly Bandz first started gaining traction. So how do these crazes gain traction? How do they hit a tipping point? Is it an elaborate plan or an accident?įrom what I can dig up, the rise of Silly Bandz seems to be more accident than master plan. In fact, they’ve become so wide-spread and such a distraction that many elementary schools have taken to banning Yet every kid has them (at least the cool ones!). Sillly Bandz are an undeniable craze – of the variety that is difficult to explain rationally. Apparently, the same negotiating tactics my older son uses atĭessert time are transferable to Silly Bandz bartering. With fellow school kids on the bus, my son has turned 12 Silly Bandz into 18 (“I traded one really cool one for two medium ones”).
Silly Bandz only came into my personal consciousness last month when my nephews in Texas sent my 6 year-old son a 12 pack of them.
And as I write this, I’m quite certain that millions of kids have them around their wrists at (shapes of animals, automobiles, planes, etc) and are just big enough to fit around a kid’s wrist. They are essentially colored rubber bands that are molded into shapes Not in a funny way, but more in an inconsequential way. And rest assured, someone’s making millions from But take it from me, Silly Bandz are a big deal. If you don’t have kids – or more specifically, you don’t have kids between the ages of 5 and 11 – you’re probably completely unaware of Silly Bandz.
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