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!
> As my eldest son’s birthday was approaching, we suggested that instead of asking for physical gifts, he ask for their equivalent in money. That way, he gathered a decent amount of capital for his first investment adventure.
Yes, why would you want a toy or a book? Why waste time having fun or learning? You could instead watch a number go up slowly while you do nothing. Fun for the whole family, seconds at a time!
> Each day, as they watch their small fund grow, they grasp the magic of compound interest — and that, more than any gift, is a lesson I hope will stay with them for life.
This feels like raising finance dude bros and gambling addicts. There is no “magic” to compound interest, no one should have “watch money accumulate” as a life goal.
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.
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?
For me, the ethics of investing is a bit more profound. I see stock market investment and share holding to be one of the main drivers of civilisations obsession with endless consumption and growth. To me those things are damaging to our minds and our planet. This is just doing the same retarded shit we’ve been doing since the end of the war. Personally I feel like we need to turn a corner now; ease-off this obsession with accumulating as much money as possible for ourselves and focus on our communities, our families, living in balance with nature, and securing a healthy future together with new values and goals that last. Investing into the stock market is like the opposite of this. Just my opinion.
> One thing that school doesn’t teach you (not even high school) is how to manage your personal finances.
Can we stop with this myth? Most states require financial literacy courses to graduate. The reason it feels like it isn't happening is because it's boring and most just don't pay attention or absorb the lessons.
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 think the assumption here is the investment vehicle will be large bundles of diverse stocks, e.g. via a mutual fund or equivalent ETF. That's the standard way to invest 401Ks and other savings, and something for which stock tips are no use.
In December 2017 I literally saw shopkeepers and barbers checking Coinbase every few minutes when they weren't with customers. I sold a substantial portion shortly afterwards. Of course I'd be much richer today if I hadn't done that. But I don't really regret it because it's not real investing; it's speculation.
Sure, I did that in 2018 as I was leaving London. Cabbie was talking about the coins he was buying and this and that. Bitcoin was $10k/coin at the time. I sold my bitcoin as soon as I reached Heathrow. This was a very wise move because I followed the story.
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.
Not the OC, but yeah I've noticed this myself actually. I read HN because I love science and technology, but I don't work in either area. I work at a dead-end job as a cashier and barely make ends meet. Some of the people on here are exceedingly privileged and really don't realize it.
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.
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.
At the point with investment I was lost. Children should learn to be patient (saving money) and prepare for bad situations (saving money). That’s enough.
When older we can teach them what capitalism considers as investment. Capitalism is a longer word for greed.
Money doesn’t work. Employees do. Customers pay. Both suffer to make greedy persons rich.
Give them a piggy bank. Teaches the concept of preparation.
You say "when older we can teach them what capitalism considers as investment" but you never specify the age. What exactly counts as older? My mom started telling me about how the new home we just moved into was both a place to live and also an investment at age 8. My dad started telling me about his brokerage account when I was 7. My dad also explained to me why the new car we just bought was not an investment when I was 6.
That's to say, I strongly disagree. It's almost never too early to teach this to children. As soon as children know money could be spent on exchange for things, they should begin to think about how money is made.
Even saving can be seen as greed. Someone can focus too much on accumulating for themselves. Both investing and saving can be seen as preparation.
To avoid things becoming evil, you just need to make sure that your interactions with other are cooperative and not zero sum, and not all investments are zero sum.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Stock picking and speculation especially with a single company is indeed a spectacularly bad strategy, but it can be a motivating start.
A well diversified fund would be the better alternative if you need to aim at a single thing. But it's hard to say what's the better first step if you're trying to teach personal finance management.
> 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.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 73.8 ms ] threadAuthor 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!
Then orchestrate an artificial bubble and crash
> As my eldest son’s birthday was approaching, we suggested that instead of asking for physical gifts, he ask for their equivalent in money. That way, he gathered a decent amount of capital for his first investment adventure.
Yes, why would you want a toy or a book? Why waste time having fun or learning? You could instead watch a number go up slowly while you do nothing. Fun for the whole family, seconds at a time!
> Each day, as they watch their small fund grow, they grasp the magic of compound interest — and that, more than any gift, is a lesson I hope will stay with them for life.
This feels like raising finance dude bros and gambling addicts. There is no “magic” to compound interest, no one should have “watch money accumulate” as a life goal.
Are they actually investing anything? If so, wouldn’t the app for the brokerage do this with real numbers?
- react app - pwa manifest - tailwind css
This is not at all a "plain html" file.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://localhost:8080/en/dinversiones" />
Author then proceeds to put 15% annual interest rate...
(I'm told to no longer bet on even averaging 7% annually, over decades, on US stock indexes.)
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.
Can we stop with this myth? Most states require financial literacy courses to graduate. The reason it feels like it isn't happening is because it's boring and most just don't pay attention or absorb the lessons.
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.”
Even George Hotz understands this is the symptom of a larger issue and it is going to end bad: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/24/gambl...
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.
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.
When older we can teach them what capitalism considers as investment. Capitalism is a longer word for greed. Money doesn’t work. Employees do. Customers pay. Both suffer to make greedy persons rich.
Give them a piggy bank. Teaches the concept of preparation.
That's to say, I strongly disagree. It's almost never too early to teach this to children. As soon as children know money could be spent on exchange for things, they should begin to think about how money is made.
To avoid things becoming evil, you just need to make sure that your interactions with other are cooperative and not zero sum, and not all investments are zero sum.
I don't want to work until I'm dead. If that makes me greedy, so be it.
Now if only there’s an app that can teach delayed gratification.
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 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.
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)
There is definitely money left on the table when you ignore the market, even in a retirement fund.
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...
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.
A well diversified fund would be the better alternative if you need to aim at a single thing. But it's hard to say what's the better first step if you're trying to teach personal finance management.
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.