When do you talk to your kids about investing (if ever)?

Money Management
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Hope everyone is having a good week! I have a parenting money question: When do you plan to (or did you) talk to your kids about investing?

I grew up in a house where I was taught to save my money, and I’m grateful for that. However, we never really talked about investing.

As a result, investing for me has mostly been limited to my 401(k). I recently opened a Robinhood account to invest in an ETF via the dollar-cost average method. (I know a few bucks a week won’t make me rich, but you have to start someplace, right?)

That left me wondering if I should be doing more to teach my 12-year-old about investing. I certainly don’t feel like an expert, and part of me thinks that she should focus on saving instead.

But another part of me wonders if she wouldn’t benefit from learning early by investing just a little bit of her money. Recovering from the loss of a small amount — even if it seems big to her at the moment — could still be a valuable lesson.

So for those with kids in their lives, how have you approached investing, if at all? And if they do invest, do your kids have separate accounts? Just looking for a jumping off point — thanks!

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Hello Tiffany, my kids were not interested, but I’ll help you out. I say avoid Robinhood and the like companies as they charge fees, along with taking about 1,000 years to see any results. Use one of the following companies and open a ROTH IRA for your child and while you’re at it for yourself too. TDAmeritrade, Schwab, Fidelity, as they eliminated their fees years ago. To learn about what is a ROTH IRA use Wikipedia to understand the ins and outs of how they work to your advantage. Sign up for the DRIP plan too. You don’t have to invest the full yearly amounted of $6,000.00 for under 50 years of age and you don’t have to invest the full $7,000.00 amount for over 50 years of age, invest what you can afford.

Use Yahoo Finance to look up names of companies and what they do to make money. Everything listed above is free, do your Due Diligence (also known as homework) and you thought skool ended years ago, LOL. Listed next are real stock traded companies that pay dividends. Look up on Yahoo Finance to find out what the companies do for a living to earn their money. Walmart, Hasbro, Costco, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Lowes, Home Depot, Procter and Gamble, Kelloggs, Duke Realty, IBM, Altria, Microsoft, Cisco, these are just a few examples of real companies as there are thousands of companies out there that are stock traded. Some pay quarterly, monthly, semi-annually, and annually. Some don’t pay dividends at all. What you want to invest in are growth and income stocks.

Listed next are stock ticker symbols of other companies: PDI, RA, UTG, NEWT, O, DE, CAT, MCD, MAIN, CSWC, WPC, these are just a few that pay dividends

Listed next are companies ticker symbols that don’t pay dividends, TSLA, GOOG, AMZN, BRK-A, BRK-B, FB, these are known as growth companies. There are lots of them too.

I have been investing for over 25 years now and learned the hard way as it is not taught in school.

Feel free to email/pm/contact me if you need additional help. Everything I tell you is/will be free of charge. Pay it Forward. I will reply back within 24 hours.

My name is Bob.

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I have not discussed investing with them beyond talking about my 403B. I am learning more over the last few years, and we have a pretty open discussion about finances in general at my house. My husband did pretty well on the market, and he talks about it with them.

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i do have a lot of questions to ask about the stock market just need a little help or guidance Thank you

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To challenge the way you think about money from your childhood, I recommend starting with a Dave Ramsey book or Rich Dad Poor Dad. My parents were in a similar situation, where they didn’t save anything and were constantly in credit card debt.