[Note: The following is a guest article from the "Ask Anne Blog." It is published here as a courtesy. The opinions expressed here are the opinions of the "Ask Anne Blog", and are not necessarily those of The Skilled Investor. The Skilled Investor received no compensation for the publication of this courtesy article.]
Coming of Age with the Stock Market: Teach Kids to Find Their Investor Personality Avoid Bad Money Habits That Can Stress Them Out as Adults
—Some people should never invest in the stock market. Better to know this when you’re investing paper route money, instead of gambling and losing your retirement money, and maybe your house.—
If your teen already has a driver’s license but doesn’t yet know what kind of an investor they are, they could be running behind, and it may come back to haunt them.
Imagine being 25 years old before your first kiss. Who’d wait that long for such an important right of passage?
Well, waiting to learn about money, and which investments are the best fit for you, is just as fundamental in our society, yet we don’t teach our kids anything about it. The schools won’t teach it, so it is up to parents, just like explaining that butterfly in the stomach feeling after your first kiss. You answer the teen questions about love: How did you and Dad first meet, how did you know you were in love, how many boyfriends did you have before you got married?
These are much tougher emotional questions than which companies to invest in to start a good life savings program, and how to have a healthy relationship with money and earning so you’re not broke and stressed out by the time you’re 40.
Investing money is all about what your personality is like. Do you like risk? Are you obsessive? Are you too laid back? Who knows your kid as well as you do? No one.
Bring the investing lesson home. And if you don’t know about mechanics of investing yourself, learn it with the kids. There are many resources to do this, many teachers available. For example, you can bring in a financial planner. Teens will like that you’re learning something together, that you’re not a know-it-all.
But before you bring in a planner, or start investing, it’s much more important to help your [...]