10 tips for talking to teenagers about investing

If you have teenagers, then this thought must have crossed your mind at some point: “if only they would do some of the things I wish I had done!” Maybe you always dreamed of visiting Paris or taking a year off after high school to try your hand at painting. Perhaps you hope your children will take the leaps you never took, and now that they are teenagers they may be ready to take those leaps. The most important thing you can do now is to give them the basic skills to succeed in life. One of the best ways to do this is to teach the teenagers in your life how to invest their money – at least once they start making it!

Just as saving is a good subject for children to learn, investing is a great skill for teenagers. Sadly, investing is still not taught in most secondary schools, and many parents who are struggling to get out of debt may not have the background themselves to educate their children. Parents may be embarrassed to admit everything they don’t know about investing, but just like “the talk” about sex or drugs, that embarrassment must be overcome for the teenager’s sake!

So what can you do? A few simple steps can be taken. None of them require a huge investment of time.

1. Open a custodial account. A custodial account is opened in the name of an adult “for the benefit of” a minor as a Uniform Gift to Minors Act (UGMA) or Uniform Transfers to Minors Act (UTMA), depending on your state of residence. If your child’s interest and dividend income (including capital gain distributions) total less than $8,500, the child’s parent may be able to choose to include that income on the parent’s return rather than file a return for the child. If the child’s interest, dividends, and other investment income total more than $1,700, part of that income may be taxed at the parent’s tax rate instead of the child’s tax rate.
2. Put some dollars in their investment account – the amount is not particularly important. If you have the resources to give your child a lot of money to invest, do it. If you don’t have the resources, don’t worry – the purpose is to educate at an early age. Once they have their own money, they can invest it themselves. Your role is to start the fire, not to bring the logs.
3. Contribute a certain amount in lieu of gifts. So much angst is created in our consumer-driven society by a corporate-imposed mandate to buy love through “stuff.” Your child is going to whine when you don’t buy them a Wii and instead give them $300 to invest. Your job as a parent is to show them, both in word and action, that until they make their own money, it is your money to spend as you see fit. Toys will be forgotten.
4. Sit down and explain the basics. You may not understand the basics of investing. Study. Read blogs, read some of the basic books on investing. You don’t need to understand option puts. You need to understand what a share is, why dividends are paid, what unrealized and realized gains and losses are. If you don’t understand these terms, study.
5. Don’t just buy a “how to” book, though. If you buy a cookbook and follow its directions point-for-point, you can bake a cake. But teachers don’t just stand in front of a classroom reading directions from a textbook point-for-point, though, and great chefs do not rush back and forth to check whether to add flour or bacon grease to a chocolate cake. They understand their subject well enough to teach it themselves, not just by reading a book aloud. Do the same with investing – read about investing, not “how to” invest. Sit down with them. Make sure you read the books at the same time as they do. Work through the book with them – make it a question-and-answer exercise.
6. Choose investments together; involve them. To illustrate this point, we made the mistake of steering my wife’s (much) younger sister away from a “trendy” stock (AAPL) she wanted to buy in favor of a “solid” one (INTL). Even though our reasoning was sound, the decision to buy a particular stock has to be the teenager’s, not yours, or she will lose interest in investing. If you make the choices, it becomes another adult-driven enterprise that they have no real “say” in. If they want to invest in risky investments that fail, let them! Losing money can be as much of a lesson as making money. Teenagers are young; they have time to recover from their losses.
7. Go over it every month or quarter or year to review what went right and wrong. Make sure you sit down and look at “what ifs.” What if that dividend had been reinvested? What if the money had been put in a CD instead of stocks? Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been worse. Make sure they understand the parts that went wrong – it may be even more important than understanding what went right.
8. If your teen makes some money, ask them to reinvest at least 10% of it, even it that means just a single dollar. Reinvesting is one of the keys to building wealth. Dividends and gains are not money for spending – not ever. Teach your teenager that just because they’ve received a dividend is no reason to spend it on “stuff.” Learn how to reinvest before ever even touching the money by using DRIPs (dividend reinvesting plans).
9. Teach them not to touch their principal. I find that thinking of principal as if it were a house’s foundation is useful. Before you can build a castle, you have to lay down a foundation. You can’t pull chunks out of the foundation just because you’re running short of concrete to build a tower. The base of an investment portfolio has to be thought of as untouchable.
10. Consider alternative ways of investing. Most of the examples I’ve given are equities, because that’s a low-barrier entry into investing. You can easily invest small amounts in the market. That doesn’t mean your teenager can’t learn about investing in real estate or businesses or P2P lending. The same lessons can come from successes and failures in those areas. If your teenager is more interested in building an online business with their investing money, let them. Help them decide, let them succeed or fail on their own, and help them review the results. Despite what the conventional wisdom of the retirement-planning industry may say, you can invest without putting money in the market.

Keep your teenagers engaged and interested, and YOU may even get excited about investing – even if you’ve never done it before! Remember that spending and saving habits are established early in life. Small actions now can stoke the fire of determination to achieve financial success for a lifetime. You can provide the spark.

photo credit: lenifuzhead

A great book to get started with is The Motley Fool Investment Guide for Teens: 8 Steps to Having More Money Than Your Parents Ever Dreamed Of

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