You Get $500 If You Give Have A Baby Today

Are you pregnant? Maybe expecting your bundle of joy soon? Okay, scratch that — are you expecting to deliver your child on Monday, Oct. 20? That's right, today, and not a minute sooner or later. Well, if you do, you'll have fallen into some absolutely phenomenal luck: a company called Voya Financial is giving $500 for babies born Oct. 20, doling out funds as a means to aid their rebranding effort. Voya used to be merely the U.S. subsidiary of multinational banking company ING, but now they've broken apart into their own, independent company, and they're trying to drum up some awareness of that fact.

And obviously, handling out hundreds of dollars to some bleary-eyed new parents is a hell of a way to draw attention. Here's the basic deal: you have a baby on Oct. 20, meaning the little guy or girl is out of the womb before midnight, and Voya will give you $500 in the form of a mutual fund investment. The offer is tied into the so-called National Save for Retirement Week, which runs from Oct. 20 to Oct. 26, so Voya is planning to ply you with a small nest egg for your child's future.

This may be something of a drawback, however — the investment will enter Voya’s Global Target Payment Fund, which according to Time yields poor returns relative to its costs. But you're not under any obligation to actually keep the money invested like they're wanting you to.

You could pull the money out for your own immediate purposes if you needed, or you could even reinvest it in a more preferable spot than Voya's program. Whatever you decide, it's still a bit of free funding.

According to USA Today, Voya's chief marketing officer Ann Glover confirmed that the money would be receivable by parents if they so wished, even though the company hopes (obviously) that people will stay invested through them.

You can remove the funds, but we are ever hopeful that people will leave the money in there as a head start for their child's retirement. ... We think that achieving financial security is one of the biggest challenges our country faces, and this campaign is an opportunity to get people thinking differently about how they can improve their retirement readiness.

Of course, let's stay sensible about this; nothing's more important than a newborn's health, certainly not $500. But if you do happen to give birth today, make sure you don't forget to register at voya.com/borntosave. You have until Dec. 19.

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