There's an awful lot of negativity here, but as someone who's 55 and has earned a good wage since I was 17, I really wish I had taken investing more seriously from the very beginning. While I knew of compound interest, I really didn't understand it until like a decade ago. If I'd started putting 5% of my money into a target retirement plan from 17, I'd be retired now. As it is I'm not doing badly, but I really wish I'd started earlier.
So I say: Good on you.
Somewhat related: I just got my son set up with a custodial account and put his "kid retirement" plan into it, and let him pick a couple stocks to put some money into, and put the majority of it into target retirement and a few stocks and EFTs, so he can get some ideas of how they perform, make it a little fun with picking things he's into, and also follow ups and downs of the market, all of which I think is good education.
Investing for retirement at 17 is a bad idea! At 17 you should still be thinking about investing in education - the right education investment today will pay back far more than any other monitory investment. There are of course bad education investments, and some are not willing to study even more (or not able to pass a good education course), in that case retirement might be the best investment you can make, but it should not be your first choice.
A different reply said they waited until 26 to start - that is probably about the right time to start saving for retirement. Maybe a little late, but close enough. Before about that age you are still getting started and so you have little spare cash. You need to pay off school loans (if you took any). You need to save for down payment on a house, and buy a lot of those will last a lifetime household items everyone needs. You should be thinking about marriage and saving for it (even if you don't get legally married most people will live with someone else and should be planning on how to make that life work).
Most important: you don't know how long you will live. Save for the future, but not everything - you have no guarantee you will live to tomorrow - if you are under 60 odds are strongly in favor of it, but people die young all the time. You should have a little play money as well in your budget. Go climb Mt Fuji while your body is young and healthy enough to do so (I picked a random activity here, you should decide what you care about, not rush to Japan)
Sometimes I feel like I started investing late at 26. Already, six years into the best decade for compounding in your life. But such was the power of compounding that I had reached a substantial net worth by age 35. So even just nine years can make such a tremendous difference even into later ages. It's never too late to sock money away.
I started my daughter investing with a custodial account at 13. She put a few hundred dollars of her money in and I convinced her by matching her investment and told her if the amount ever went below the original investment I would backstop any loss.
Investing is all about that long term gain and slow growth. Having 10 years of experience after finishing college will do so much more than Robinhood for refrigerators.
You say that now but as a young person with a decent income and no family or many responsibilities it's hard to even know where to start.
And I'm not even talking about what to invest in, I'm already confused at which platform/bank/whatever to do it through. The "meta", if you will. I just want to invest the 70% of my salary I don't need every month and not think about it for 40 years but how? Maybe an important detail, I'm from Switzerland, perhaps it's easier in the US with things like Vanguard.
Same. But is same for most people. Average American retirement savings is like $200k. I've done better that that but not by orders of magnitude.
About six years ago I was hired to make an investment simulator. I wish someone had show the results to me when I was a teen. I did show it to my daughter at the time (she was in college), and used it to explain the power of compounding interest.
I found they still an old preview online (sorry not https)
That's why you shouldn't leave it up to a kid with very little money who quite literally cannot understand the long term impacts of their decisions to invest or not. Instead, put aside something for them. You can even start well before they are 17.
> There's an awful lot of negativity here, but as someone who's 55 and has earned a good wage since I was 17, I really wish I had taken investing more seriously from the very beginning. While I knew of compound interest, I really didn't understand it until like a decade ago. If I'd started putting 5% of my money into a target retirement plan from 17, I'd be retired now. As it is I'm not doing badly, but I really wish I'd started earlier.
I'm 55, too. If I'd started studying HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and Rust at 17, I'd be retired now. Waitaminnit....
Sarcasm aside, target retirement plans wouldn't come along for decades. Investing was very, very different when we were 17. And many of the people who were 55 when we were 17 had just lost a terrifying amount of their life's savings in a stock market crash that made Taleb rich because he'd bet against the market.
It seems extraordinarily unlikely that a 17-year-old today should do exactly what we wish we could have done when we were 17. About the best they can do is follow advice that's now centuries old: make friends, learn skills, live below their means, and, maybe, earn credentials.
Thanks for your encouragement!. I started investing in my mid-30s, and compound interest really works wonders after a while. I hope my kids do better than me, though.
> and let him pick a couple stocks to put some money into
And yet we complain that corps today are too focused on their market valuation over everything else; customer experience, longevity, worker conditions, R&D are all being neglected in order to make the needle go up.
'Investing' in stocks in order to flip them when the price goes up is feeding this insanity. Teaching kids that this is perfectly rational seems selfish and short-sighted.
Our children should be encouraged to invest into something like bonds which actually help promote economic growth.
Actively invested retirement funds throughout 30+ years can also catch more concentrated moves if you are educated on a sector. For example, choosing the mag7 in the early 2010s vs just the SPY. Following the market could also let you pull out during serious world events.
There is definitely money left on the table when you ignore the market, even in a retirement fund.
Financial literacy is a gift, and absolutely omitted from standard education, which is unfortunate.
That said, I don't think knowledge of investment gets you very far if your job pays subsistence wages. I worked for a popular fintech focused on personal investment and their narrative was essentially "financial freedom through investment". I think it's important to understand that even the most sophisticated knowledge of investment and personal finance does nothing substantial if you aren't making surplus money to begin with.
I don't know what you mean by that. They teach compound interest in every school. Basic economics too. Anything more advanced is going to be lost on most kids, because that's most adults' level of financial literacy too.
The problem is many kids don't have much money to save or invest. Or if they do, real banks kinda suck when you only have a kid amount of money ("Here's the 0.2% interest on your $37 balance"). So they can't apply what they learned. An app like this, backed by the Bank of Mom and Dad, is great for practice.
investment for many is more important than ever, because with home ownership out of reach younger people those with any savings are looking for alternatives. I just hope that - much like how you wouldn't buy and sell your house every day - they can resist the urge to be overly active investors.
Sure but if you learn a lot about investing then surely you have learned a lot about other stuff too and maybe have chances at a good job. Not that I disagree
You are that guy. It was obvious that he built some interactive app packaged in a single html file. There's going to be javascript and stuff in there...doah.
EDIT: I wouldn't have expected external dependencies, though.
There’s an old story about Rothschild getting a haircut when the barber started giving him stock tips. Rothschild thanked him, left the shop, and immediately sold all his holdings. The reason was: “When even the barber is investing, the market’s gone too far.”
I might be wrong, but reading this, I couldn’t help but think: if we’ve reached the point where we’re building apps to get our kids into investing, maybe we’re living through our own “barber moment.”
I had a very similar idea this summer. But my kids are 6 and 8, so I approached it using the video game approach. It's been an absolute smash hit and entirely altered the habits of doing chores in this home. It's been about 3 months and it's still going stronger than ever. The whole thing is a static page, driven by a Google Spreadsheet that Mom and I edit to adjust goals and track progress.
M dashes everywhere, bold text everywhere ... what's next, teaching them to over-rely on LLM's? And if we're teaching them about investing, can we also teach them about the ethics of investing? As in, employing a bunch of people to direct the profit of their work into the hands of investors?
I run a "Bank of Dad", tracked in a spreadsheet for my kids. They can choose to "invest" their money with me or not. To make investing meaningful for them, I pay 10% interest per month, up to a $50 balance.
To avoid bankrupting myself—and to encourage them to get a real investment account when the time comes—the rate drops as the balance increases, similar to progressive tax brackets. By the time they get to $1000 balance, the annualized rate works out to ~6%, and after that it drops fast enough that it's essentially free for me to operate.
Overall, it's been quite successful. Now whenever the kids get money, they invest it immediately. And they often delay or forego spending so that they can get more interest the next month. They haven't turned into complete misers, but it has encourage a mentality of thinking about saving, and I think the concept of interest has landed quite well. I think things really started to click for them around age 8 or 9.
These kids are going to be so mad at how low interest rates are at actual banks that I wonder if this is ultimately going to teach them to borrow rather than save. I guess it’s the same thing, really: they’re learning the time value of money either way.
When I started working at 24, a friend of mine (a few years older than me) asked me if our company had a 401(K) and what was the match.
I was confused. What's this gobbledygook? So I asked around and got him the answers, and he responded with: max out your 401(K). Just do it. And do not ever think about taking money out of it.
So I followed his advice. At that time, the ~$5500 cut in paycheck (my gross was around $35K, IIRC) stung a little. I was single, footloose and fancyfree, and those extra few hundred dollars a month would have been fun to have. But I stuck to his advice.
Today, almost 30 years later, thanks to that, I have a nice nest egg and don't have to worry about retirement (modulo catastrophic illnesses, of course).
So recently my friends' kids started working, and I gave them the same advice: Max out your 401(K), pick a Vanguard Target Retirement fund, and forget about it. If your place offers a "Mega Back Door" option, use it to the fullest extent possible. And if your company has a HDHCP, put funds in your HSA too.
We have a lot of avenues to save these days. Make full use of them.
Showing siblings' investment performance side-by-side on a fridge-mounted screen.
Author understands child psychology.
You can't motivate kids by filling their heads with theory. Instead, make the outcomes of their actions visible to them - then they -motivate themselves- to learn how to improve those outcomes. Add in some friendly peer-competition and you're golden!
Nice! I also created a "virtual bank account" for my kids when they were 7-8yo. They can choose to take the weekly cash or put it in their savings account. My bank gives them a 5% interest rate per month, which isn't bad. Explaining the idea of compound interest this way is easy.
However, I think that's the easier part of being an investor. The more complicated part is risk management. With a savings account, there is basically zero risk. But that's not how you invest these days.
Be careful with comparing real-life things and experiences with a (virtual) number on a screen, especially for children.
I used to know an adult who only cared about that number going up, despite making more than a comfortable amount of money. Live with parents, save on rent/mortgage, number goes up faster. Buy cheapest food, take leftovers from work-catered lunches, number goes up faster. Scam your way into being hired for a position you are severely underqualified for, get terminated after three months, keep the salary and sign-on bonus, number goes up. Invest pretty much everything (because there are almost no expenses), compound interest.
Being encouraged to invest is nice but having the ability to is a massive luxury.
I knew I wanted to save a lot for my future and retirement since I was in high school. I didn’t gain any reasonable ability to do so until much later.
A much better life skill in my opinion would be to teach about budgeting, how to cook economical meals, how to avoid debt traps and lifestyle inflation.
You're giving a 15% growth rate with zero volatility? That isn't going to teach many important lessons.
How about offering a range of rates with volatility increasing as rate increases. Then they can think about the benefit of guaranteed return vs the benefit of long-term growth, or a combination of both.
OP: I think introducing volatility (which you can just model with one percentage variable and a sinusoidal multiplier based on this: 100% volatility means if your "real" balance was going to be $100 today, it varies between $0 and $200 ; 10% volatility means you're fluctuating between $90 and $110) is also a good idea in teaching kids to refrain from the impulse of withdrawing the money just because today's daily gain is in the red.
> I explained to my kids that investing is like having a magic box that generates more money over time.
That is wildly misleading. Investing is super important, but it shouldn't be described in this fairy-tale way. Young people might be misled into trusting investment advisors/counselors/brokers, whose real goal is to enrich themselves at your expense. In fact, there are adults who haven't yet learned this.
An article about investing that doesn't mention the WSJ dartboard contest isn't worth reading -- essentially, over 14 years, random stock picks produced returns equal to those of stockbrokers, before the stockbroker's fees and other costs were subtracted.
An investment counselor's primary goal is to make you think you need his services. His secondary goes is to keep you from performing your own research to discover that is false.
I have set up a similar Google sheet for my 12 yo, which is shared with him on view-only mode. He loves the idea that he's earning $$ every day out of his savings. He's on fire to grow his investment to the point that he earns $5 every day, "while sleeping". He's currently making ~$2/day.
[+] [-] linsomniac|4 months ago|reply
So I say: Good on you.
Somewhat related: I just got my son set up with a custodial account and put his "kid retirement" plan into it, and let him pick a couple stocks to put some money into, and put the majority of it into target retirement and a few stocks and EFTs, so he can get some ideas of how they perform, make it a little fun with picking things he's into, and also follow ups and downs of the market, all of which I think is good education.
[+] [-] bluGill|4 months ago|reply
A different reply said they waited until 26 to start - that is probably about the right time to start saving for retirement. Maybe a little late, but close enough. Before about that age you are still getting started and so you have little spare cash. You need to pay off school loans (if you took any). You need to save for down payment on a house, and buy a lot of those will last a lifetime household items everyone needs. You should be thinking about marriage and saving for it (even if you don't get legally married most people will live with someone else and should be planning on how to make that life work).
Most important: you don't know how long you will live. Save for the future, but not everything - you have no guarantee you will live to tomorrow - if you are under 60 odds are strongly in favor of it, but people die young all the time. You should have a little play money as well in your budget. Go climb Mt Fuji while your body is young and healthy enough to do so (I picked a random activity here, you should decide what you care about, not rush to Japan)
[+] [-] ashleyn|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] elictronic|4 months ago|reply
Investing is all about that long term gain and slow growth. Having 10 years of experience after finishing college will do so much more than Robinhood for refrigerators.
[+] [-] sureglymop|4 months ago|reply
And I'm not even talking about what to invest in, I'm already confused at which platform/bank/whatever to do it through. The "meta", if you will. I just want to invest the 70% of my salary I don't need every month and not think about it for 40 years but how? Maybe an important detail, I'm from Switzerland, perhaps it's easier in the US with things like Vanguard.
[+] [-] intrasight|4 months ago|reply
About six years ago I was hired to make an investment simulator. I wish someone had show the results to me when I was a teen. I did show it to my daughter at the time (she was in college), and used it to explain the power of compounding interest.
I found they still an old preview online (sorry not https)
http://simulators.gibsoncapital.com/new-preview-for-total-si...
[+] [-] nonethewiser|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] abc3|4 months ago|reply
I'm 55, too. If I'd started studying HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and Rust at 17, I'd be retired now. Waitaminnit....
Sarcasm aside, target retirement plans wouldn't come along for decades. Investing was very, very different when we were 17. And many of the people who were 55 when we were 17 had just lost a terrifying amount of their life's savings in a stock market crash that made Taleb rich because he'd bet against the market.
It seems extraordinarily unlikely that a 17-year-old today should do exactly what we wish we could have done when we were 17. About the best they can do is follow advice that's now centuries old: make friends, learn skills, live below their means, and, maybe, earn credentials.
[+] [-] roberdam|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dingaling|4 months ago|reply
And yet we complain that corps today are too focused on their market valuation over everything else; customer experience, longevity, worker conditions, R&D are all being neglected in order to make the needle go up.
'Investing' in stocks in order to flip them when the price goes up is feeding this insanity. Teaching kids that this is perfectly rational seems selfish and short-sighted.
Our children should be encouraged to invest into something like bonds which actually help promote economic growth.
[+] [-] ivape|4 months ago|reply
There is definitely money left on the table when you ignore the market, even in a retirement fund.
[+] [-] dostick|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nxor|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ericyd|4 months ago|reply
That said, I don't think knowledge of investment gets you very far if your job pays subsistence wages. I worked for a popular fintech focused on personal investment and their narrative was essentially "financial freedom through investment". I think it's important to understand that even the most sophisticated knowledge of investment and personal finance does nothing substantial if you aren't making surplus money to begin with.
[+] [-] triceratops|4 months ago|reply
The problem is many kids don't have much money to save or invest. Or if they do, real banks kinda suck when you only have a kid amount of money ("Here's the 0.2% interest on your $37 balance"). So they can't apply what they learned. An app like this, backed by the Bank of Mom and Dad, is great for practice.
[+] [-] bilekas|4 months ago|reply
With my tinfoil hat on, I feel like that is by design.
[+] [-] skeeter2020|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nxor|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] freitzzz|4 months ago|reply
- react app - pwa manifest - tailwind css
This is not at all a "plain html" file.
[+] [-] mrweasel|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] brazukadev|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] linhns|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dangus|4 months ago|reply
The AI just picked react because that’s the most common framework.
[+] [-] b_e_n_t_o_n|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mpalmer|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] taude|4 months ago|reply
EDIT: I wouldn't have expected external dependencies, though.
[+] [-] johntiror|4 months ago|reply
I might be wrong, but reading this, I couldn’t help but think: if we’ve reached the point where we’re building apps to get our kids into investing, maybe we’re living through our own “barber moment.”
[+] [-] Waterluvian|4 months ago|reply
https://ibb.co/RTw5sCDJ https://ibb.co/ycRB8750 https://ibb.co/gLGQ0tKT
[+] [-] nxor|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bruckie|4 months ago|reply
To avoid bankrupting myself—and to encourage them to get a real investment account when the time comes—the rate drops as the balance increases, similar to progressive tax brackets. By the time they get to $1000 balance, the annualized rate works out to ~6%, and after that it drops fast enough that it's essentially free for me to operate.
Overall, it's been quite successful. Now whenever the kids get money, they invest it immediately. And they often delay or forego spending so that they can get more interest the next month. They haven't turned into complete misers, but it has encourage a mentality of thinking about saving, and I think the concept of interest has landed quite well. I think things really started to click for them around age 8 or 9.
If you're interested in doing something similar, I made a sanitized version of the spreadsheet. Feel free to copy: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f3FgHUohw26sHuCoO40s...
[+] [-] singleshot_|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mlmonkey|4 months ago|reply
I was confused. What's this gobbledygook? So I asked around and got him the answers, and he responded with: max out your 401(K). Just do it. And do not ever think about taking money out of it.
So I followed his advice. At that time, the ~$5500 cut in paycheck (my gross was around $35K, IIRC) stung a little. I was single, footloose and fancyfree, and those extra few hundred dollars a month would have been fun to have. But I stuck to his advice.
Today, almost 30 years later, thanks to that, I have a nice nest egg and don't have to worry about retirement (modulo catastrophic illnesses, of course).
So recently my friends' kids started working, and I gave them the same advice: Max out your 401(K), pick a Vanguard Target Retirement fund, and forget about it. If your place offers a "Mega Back Door" option, use it to the fullest extent possible. And if your company has a HDHCP, put funds in your HSA too.
We have a lot of avenues to save these days. Make full use of them.
[+] [-] Galanwe|4 months ago|reply
Author then proceeds to put 15% annual interest rate...
[+] [-] neilv|4 months ago|reply
(I'm told to no longer bet on even averaging 7% annually, over decades, on US stock indexes.)
[+] [-] cbeach|4 months ago|reply
Author understands child psychology.
You can't motivate kids by filling their heads with theory. Instead, make the outcomes of their actions visible to them - then they -motivate themselves- to learn how to improve those outcomes. Add in some friendly peer-competition and you're golden!
[+] [-] pprotas|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] roberdam|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] meatjuice|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thw_9a83c|4 months ago|reply
However, I think that's the easier part of being an investor. The more complicated part is risk management. With a savings account, there is basically zero risk. But that's not how you invest these days.
[+] [-] LandR|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] yaky|4 months ago|reply
I used to know an adult who only cared about that number going up, despite making more than a comfortable amount of money. Live with parents, save on rent/mortgage, number goes up faster. Buy cheapest food, take leftovers from work-catered lunches, number goes up faster. Scam your way into being hired for a position you are severely underqualified for, get terminated after three months, keep the salary and sign-on bonus, number goes up. Invest pretty much everything (because there are almost no expenses), compound interest.
[+] [-] dangus|4 months ago|reply
I knew I wanted to save a lot for my future and retirement since I was in high school. I didn’t gain any reasonable ability to do so until much later.
A much better life skill in my opinion would be to teach about budgeting, how to cook economical meals, how to avoid debt traps and lifestyle inflation.
[+] [-] pmg102|4 months ago|reply
How about offering a range of rates with volatility increasing as rate increases. Then they can think about the benefit of guaranteed return vs the benefit of long-term growth, or a combination of both.
[+] [-] sebastiennight|4 months ago|reply
Another add to the feature request list :)
[+] [-] lutusp|4 months ago|reply
That is wildly misleading. Investing is super important, but it shouldn't be described in this fairy-tale way. Young people might be misled into trusting investment advisors/counselors/brokers, whose real goal is to enrich themselves at your expense. In fact, there are adults who haven't yet learned this.
An article about investing that doesn't mention the WSJ dartboard contest isn't worth reading -- essentially, over 14 years, random stock picks produced returns equal to those of stockbrokers, before the stockbroker's fees and other costs were subtracted.
An investment counselor's primary goal is to make you think you need his services. His secondary goes is to keep you from performing your own research to discover that is false.
[+] [-] _ache_|4 months ago|reply
<link rel="canonical" href="http://localhost:8080/en/dinversiones" />
[+] [-] roberdam|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bhu1st|4 months ago|reply
I have set up a similar Google sheet for my 12 yo, which is shared with him on view-only mode. He loves the idea that he's earning $$ every day out of his savings. He's on fire to grow his investment to the point that he earns $5 every day, "while sleeping". He's currently making ~$2/day.
[+] [-] beej71|4 months ago|reply