How To Give Your Teens Financial Training Wheels
You've probably been preparing your children academically, socially, and morally for their future lives as adults.
If you are like most parents, however, one of the things you are missing is financial literacy preparation for your children -- especially relating to basic investing skills.
This is a problem because as soon as your young adults leave the house, perhaps to go to college and hopefully to start working, they are suddenly expected to know how to manage their financial affairs.
The truth is that there are no financial or investing training wheels for your young adults when they leave the nest.
We can help prepare your children right now with TeenVestor Stock Certification Course.
Reasons Some Parents Don’t Encourage Young Investors
In our research, we have found that there are five major reasons parents shy away from encouraging their children to start investing early:
Parents themselves don't know much about investing;
Parents think their children can't understand investing concepts;
Parents fear their children might put too much emphasis on money;
Parents think that teaching their children about investing will interfere with their basic education (the three R's); and
Parents think investing skills will come naturally with maturity.
We DESTROY all of these reasons in our book, TeenVestor: The Practical Investment Guide for Teens and Their Parents. You can download the book here for free.
Our book, originally published by Penguin/Perigee, is the first book ever to tell teens how to invest (and to tell parents about the role they can play in the process).
All other books about teen investors by other authors just piggy-backed off our original bold idea of teaching teens how to invest.
The School System Can’t Help
If you want to boost your children's financial acumen, you probably won't get much help from your children’s schools.
A report by the Council for Economic Education, titled Survey of the States: Economic and Personal Finance Education in Our Nation’s States, showed that only 19 states required a personal finance course to be offered to students from K-12, and only 24 states required an economics class in high school.
An article by Money.com about the report had this to say about the lack of comprehensive economic education in our school system:
Young adults have been shown to have particularly low levels of financial acumen; they are most prone to expensive credit behaviors like payday loans and paying interest and late fees on credit card balances. This behavior, combined with soaring student debt, often puts them in a financial bind before they earn their first paycheck. A little financial education, the evidence now shows, may go a long way.
Money Magazine
Financial Leaders Understand What’s at Stake
Financial leaders understand the need for early financial literacy education.
Richard Fairbank, Chairman and CEO of Capital One Financial Corporation (one of the largest banks in the United States), sums it up nicely in the report mentioned earlier titled Council for Economic Education’s Survey of the States:
Recent economic challenges have highlighted the importance of teaching our kids to understand personal finance. The day-to-day relevance of economic concepts and financial responsibility will only continue to increase as the world is rapidly transformed by science and technology. Providing students with the practical tools they need to apply that knowledge will help them succeed financially by creating businesses, driving innovation, and achieving personal dreams. Working together, we can infuse our classrooms with the necessary foundational capabilities and make financial education a centerpiece of our public and private agenda.
Richard Fairbank, Chairman and CEO of Capital One Financial Corporation
These economic realities make it imperative that your children learn more than how to read, write, and do calculus. They also have to know about growing whatever amount of money they have.
By exposing your children to stocks, mutual funds, and other financial instruments at an early age, you lay the foundation for them to become savvy adult investors.
Arrival of New Investment Tools To Help Parents
Brokerage firms have noticed the desire of some parents to teach their children about investing. A number of companies are moving to capture the potential investing power in this country, and thereby expand their market reach to a new group of investors with whom they can build long-term relationships.
To encourage young people to invest early, and thereby gain their lifetime loyalty, new low-fee investment models have emerged.
For example, companies such as Betterment, Wealthfront, and Acorns have introduced low-fee services that use technology to automatically invest for clients, based on how much they want to earn and how widely they want to diversify their investments.
These types of companies, as well as low-cost online brokers, are making investing more accessible to young people with modest amounts of cash.
Start Preparing Your Teens Now!
Teaching your teens how to invest when they are still at home will help inject important money skills into their lives.
However, learning investment skills won't happen by accident. You must give them a helping hand beginning with investing lessons and custodial accounts,
This is your chance to give your teens a head start in life with the TeenVestor Stock Certification Course.
The TeenVestor Stock Certification Course is designed to help teens learn investment basics and ultimately to take control of their financial future. The location for the TeenVestor Stock Certification Course is here. The course consists of videos, text, and quizzes in modules that are easy to understand. journey into the investment world.
The video below is a quick introduction to the certification course.