Denver & Littleton Colorado Real Estate News
INSPIRATION FOR TODAY:
"Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow."
~ from "The Matchmaker" by Thornton Wilder
LEARNING AND EARNING!
A fresh year and a fresh start. Time to size everything up and rearrange our plans for the future. If you have children, maybe 2025 will be the year that you begin to prepare them for their future by beginning their "economic education."
In this age of debit and credit cards, Internet shopping and in-your-face advertising, an excellent place to start is by teaching your kids the difference between "saving" and "investing." They might "save" for a short-term goal like buying the latest X-Box game, and they might "invest" toward a long-term goal like college.
You can make it fun for everyone by setting up a "mock portfolio," containing companies your children are already familiar with, like McDonald's, Disney and Nike. With that done, show them how to find the stock prices in the newspaper or on the web. Perform some weekly monitoring for a few months, so they can learn to observe market trends.
Once they've got their brains around the concepts of diversification, liquidity and the relationship between risk and reward, you and your financial prodigy may be ready to open a mutual fund. Some are actually designed for young investors and provide educational materials.
If you don't know enough about investing to teach your child, then this will be a great project for both of you! Franklin Roosevelt observed that "happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort." By making investing fun and creative, you can encourage children (and yourself) to be more involved. It's never too early or too late to begin, and if you haven't already, then make 2025 the year to do so!