So I say: Good on you.
Somewhat related: I just got my son set up with a custodial account and put his "kid retirement" plan into it, and let him pick a couple stocks to put some money into, and put the majority of it into target retirement and a few stocks and EFTs, so he can get some ideas of how they perform, make it a little fun with picking things he's into, and also follow ups and downs of the market, all of which I think is good education.
A different reply said they waited until 26 to start - that is probably about the right time to start saving for retirement. Maybe a little late, but close enough. Before about that age you are still getting started and so you have little spare cash. You need to pay off school loans (if you took any). You need to save for down payment on a house, and buy a lot of those will last a lifetime household items everyone needs. You should be thinking about marriage and saving for it (even if you don't get legally married most people will live with someone else and should be planning on how to make that life work).
Most important: you don't know how long you will live. Save for the future, but not everything - you have no guarantee you will live to tomorrow - if you are under 60 odds are strongly in favor of it, but people die young all the time. You should have a little play money as well in your budget. Go climb Mt Fuji while your body is young and healthy enough to do so (I picked a random activity here, you should decide what you care about, not rush to Japan)
Saying "I'll do it later when it is rational" often translates to "I won't do it (for a long time)". Which is not rational
Why would you assume they are mutually exclusive? You can just do both.
One of the things I hate about my 30s is that I'm focused on money now and it feels like I'm not living the life that I want. It just feels like I'm preparing for death.
Which I'm not saying isn't the sensible thing to do, there's just something inherently managerial about it which doesn't seem intuitive to living a meaningful life.
A few examples: school loans, considering a house purchase to be a sound investment, purchasing once-in-a-lifetime household items, saving for a wedding (from the age of 17!?) or marriage (not sure what you even mean by that if you don't mean the wedding itself?).
What kind of job will be in high demand in a few years and will remain in demand for at least 20 years?
I mean, sure, in a perfect world you can postpone retirement savings. But if we're doing perfect world, you shouldn't have to think about "investing in education", your government should have the basic cognitive skills that would let it recognize that they should invest in education - ROI is pretty spectacular.
Realistically, both, because... otherwise you just pick how screwed you'll be later in life.
While the market was a very good bet for the last 50yrs, its not a guarantee.
Especially in the current climate you should be fully aware that it's significantly more risky to start investing today vs 10 yrs ago.
(Riskier doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad idea. It should just be a conscious decision under the acknowledgement that the upward trajectory is not certain. Especially in current political climate - and that "hodl"-ing doesn't necessarily mean you'll eventually get back what you invested, if a downturn manifests)
The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago.
The second best time is now.
Investing is all about that long term gain and slow growth. Having 10 years of experience after finishing college will do so much more than Robinhood for refrigerators.
My daughter I just recently set up a ROTH for her and told her I'd match anything she puts into it, and stressed she should put something into it now from her savings, and then put some of her paycheck into it, anything is better than nothing. So far she's declined the free money. I'm going to set one up for my son, once he's at the point of having an income to justify it. She's very smart, but in some ways she's very stupid.
And I'm not even talking about what to invest in, I'm already confused at which platform/bank/whatever to do it through. The "meta", if you will. I just want to invest the 70% of my salary I don't need every month and not think about it for 40 years but how? Maybe an important detail, I'm from Switzerland, perhaps it's easier in the US with things like Vanguard.
If you start to get into truly high wealth amounts (USD$500K+) you might consider hiring a wealth advisor, who can probably do better even after accounting for their fees.
People who try to time the market or wait for a perfect time or pick the exact right blend of stocks, on average, don't do as well as people who pick a boring index or mutual fund and forget about it for 40 years.
I did this at 22, and that seed money has grown a ton.
In the UK I started out using https://www.charles-stanley-direct.co.uk/ and later moved to https://www.ii.co.uk/. I initially invested in https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investments/vanguard-life... which is a fund which is available on a bunch of platforms. These days I recommend https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/ to some people as an easy and low fee way of getting started with Vanguard funds in the UK.
I don't know what the best trading platform options are in Switzerland - it looks like all of the ones I'm familiar with are not relevant to you.
The key thing is you want to minimise two types of fees: * Platform fees * Product fees
For example Charles Stanley Direct charge 0.3% platform fees, and https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/ charges 0.15% platform fees.
Vanguard LifeStrategy® 100% Equity Fund charges 0.22%.
The bottom line is that there are lots of good choices, and the main thing is to make a choice and get started. You can always optimise/improve your choices later.
As a caveat your money will be in dollars and in American companies, which might not be what you want, but it's worked for me well so far
If you max out the 3a, you can start of thinking investing elsewhere. IBKR is the cheapest to buy a US domiciled world ETF. But the UX is not super easy and you will have to fill all transactions manually in the tax report.
Neon with investments is another option I can recommend if you prefer a swiss company and a simple user interface. Fees are low if you set up a savings plan and pick one of the 0% ETFs
- There are many "getting started" guides available, I found Mister Money Mustache the most straightforward to my liking, but you're golden as long as you understand a couple of basics: 1. investing a high% of your income is more important than chasing returns (you seem to be there already), 2. don't trade, just buy the whole market (you mentioned Vanguard, they offer a "total market" ETF), 3. look for the lowest fees as long as you hold title to your shares (IB and Degiro do this ; eToro does not so if they sink, you're SOL), 4. don't time the market, just buy now and sit on it as it grows
Typical options in Europe: Trade Republic, scalable, Consors Bank.
Then the usual: Around 10K where you can access it directly, a small amount in an investment with percentage (scalable and trade republic both offer that, limit there is or was 50k), rest in one broad ETF like one that follows the FTSE all world (vanguard or invesco offer that, one is bigger, the other asks for less fees).
No affiliation, and I dont know whether being outside of the EU changes things. And yes, there is the risk that we are in a huge bubble now and it popping would at first significantly lower the money put into the etf. But you certainly do have access to vanguard etc.
Have a look now and at the latest this weekend you have this solved, hopefully forever.
About six years ago I was hired to make an investment simulator. I wish someone had show the results to me when I was a teen. I did show it to my daughter at the time (she was in college), and used it to explain the power of compounding interest.
I found they still an old preview online (sorry not https)
http://simulators.gibsoncapital.com/new-preview-for-total-si...
I'm 55, too. If I'd started studying HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and Rust at 17, I'd be retired now. Waitaminnit....
Sarcasm aside, target retirement plans wouldn't come along for decades. Investing was very, very different when we were 17. And many of the people who were 55 when we were 17 had just lost a terrifying amount of their life's savings in a stock market crash that made Taleb rich because he'd bet against the market.
It seems extraordinarily unlikely that a 17-year-old today should do exactly what we wish we could have done when we were 17. About the best they can do is follow advice that's now centuries old: make friends, learn skills, live below their means, and, maybe, earn credentials.
And yet we complain that corps today are too focused on their market valuation over everything else; customer experience, longevity, worker conditions, R&D are all being neglected in order to make the needle go up.
'Investing' in stocks in order to flip them when the price goes up is feeding this insanity. Teaching kids that this is perfectly rational seems selfish and short-sighted.
Our children should be encouraged to invest into something like bonds which actually help promote economic growth.
For me, the notion of teaching kids to invest in some company they know (Disney, McDonalds, Coke, Apple, or whatever) and telling them that they are buying a tiny, tiny share of the company is an important mental model to help shape in them.
A well diversified fund would be the better alternative if you need to aim at a single thing. But it's hard to say what's the better first step if you're trying to teach personal finance management.
Corps have always been focused on their market valuation. It's up to society, and the laws it passes, to change their incentives.
There is definitely money left on the table when you ignore the market, even in a retirement fund.
That said, I don't think knowledge of investment gets you very far if your job pays subsistence wages. I worked for a popular fintech focused on personal investment and their narrative was essentially "financial freedom through investment". I think it's important to understand that even the most sophisticated knowledge of investment and personal finance does nothing substantial if you aren't making surplus money to begin with.
The problem is many kids don't have much money to save or invest. Or if they do, real banks kinda suck when you only have a kid amount of money ("Here's the 0.2% interest on your $37 balance"). So they can't apply what they learned. An app like this, backed by the Bank of Mom and Dad, is great for practice.
I think schools and curriculums could do a whole lot better in representing this important facet of life. More broadly, I often feel that "applying all that math you've learned to real things" is a subject that could be taught.
[1] Seriously, having applied math questions like "Johnny earns X per year, with a cost of living of Y. Assuming inflation of Z and average yearly returns of R, what percentage should he be putting away, starting at age 25, so that at age 50 he essentially gets the equivalent of his own salary each month?" would likely cause some lightbulbs to go off in the kids' heads.
The vicious cycle! We have to start somewhere..
With my tinfoil hat on, I feel like that is by design.
- react app - pwa manifest - tailwind css
This is not at all a "plain html" file.
The AI just picked react because that’s the most common framework.
I mean nothing wrong with that, I needed a silly calculator thingimabob too yesterday (for some CRC checks on a piece of text) and Claude quickly cooked something up for me.
But I'm not writing blog posts about it, releasing the tool in the wild, and claiming I wrote it. Blegh.
EDIT: I wouldn't have expected external dependencies, though.
I might be wrong, but reading this, I couldn’t help but think: if we’ve reached the point where we’re building apps to get our kids into investing, maybe we’re living through our own “barber moment.”
I'm sure Mr. Rothschild would be fine with this learning tool.
Reality: Dump everything into Nvidia / S&P 500. Number go up.
Still, if a 10 year old had started investing 10% in the market in 1920 and stuck through it during the depression, even with no income coming in at the time, they would have done handsomely through the recovery and into old age. In fact, a middle aged person who had been investing until 1929 would have not been fully cleaned out, and that money would have recovered its value by 1943. Margin was what killed fortunes in the day, so the lesson to learn is to avoid margin for your investment portfolio. (Speculation is a different story).
There is no such thing as "growth detached from value" lasting forever.
Even George Hotz understands this is the symptom of a larger issue and it is going to end bad: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/24/gambl...
https://ibb.co/RTw5sCDJ https://ibb.co/ycRB8750 https://ibb.co/gLGQ0tKT
Also, what happens if one of the daily missions is not completed? Is there a passive income from those?
The dailies are a minimum requirement if they want screen time.
I spent a lot of time reflecting on video game incentives and disincentives and was incredibly careful not to teach the wrong thing. The very minimum behaviour we want to enshrine as routines. Everything else is treated as a bonus. Some days they get no coins and that’s fine. Points are never taken away. Coins are spent however they want.
The incentive was a slight rent reduction at the end of each month.
It completely failed to motivate my friends to do more chores, but it landed me my first job.
I should really clean it up and make a blog post about it. But wanted to share it here because this project reminded me of it :)
To avoid bankrupting myself—and to encourage them to get a real investment account when the time comes—the rate drops as the balance increases, similar to progressive tax brackets. By the time they get to $1000 balance, the annualized rate works out to ~6%, and after that it drops fast enough that it's essentially free for me to operate.
Overall, it's been quite successful. Now whenever the kids get money, they invest it immediately. And they often delay or forego spending so that they can get more interest the next month. They haven't turned into complete misers, but it has encourage a mentality of thinking about saving, and I think the concept of interest has landed quite well. I think things really started to click for them around age 8 or 9.
If you're interested in doing something similar, I made a sanitized version of the spreadsheet. Feel free to copy: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f3FgHUohw26sHuCoO40s...
I was confused. What's this gobbledygook? So I asked around and got him the answers, and he responded with: max out your 401(K). Just do it. And do not ever think about taking money out of it.
So I followed his advice. At that time, the ~$5500 cut in paycheck (my gross was around $35K, IIRC) stung a little. I was single, footloose and fancyfree, and those extra few hundred dollars a month would have been fun to have. But I stuck to his advice.
Today, almost 30 years later, thanks to that, I have a nice nest egg and don't have to worry about retirement (modulo catastrophic illnesses, of course).
So recently my friends' kids started working, and I gave them the same advice: Max out your 401(K), pick a Vanguard Target Retirement fund, and forget about it. If your place offers a "Mega Back Door" option, use it to the fullest extent possible. And if your company has a HDHCP, put funds in your HSA too.
We have a lot of avenues to save these days. Make full use of them.
Consider investing your time, not just your money. In other words, do careful research, start a business, then put your labor into offering a product or service that fills a need, instead of simply working for someone else. If you fail, you'll still learn a lot for another try. And if you succeed, the payoff can be much larger and faster than anything else you might attempt.
Many of them are realizing how far behind they are with someone that stuck with their tech career for 15 years.
You might actually be worse off saving for retirement, at early career stages. Of course, some will point out retirement savings are tax protected, but so are modest capital gains on primary residence.
https://i2.wp.com/financialsamurai.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
A very well-diversified, international fund usually performs at 8% annually which is far more than you would get holding REITs (or worse, properties themselves). What you invest for (e.g. education, retirement, projects) is irrelevant as long as your time horizon allows for crash recoveries (measured in decades at worst and months at best).
Author then proceeds to put 15% annual interest rate...
(I'm told to no longer bet on even averaging 7% annually, over decades, on US stock indexes.)
11% may be the safest bond you have access to, but that doesn't make it _safe_ in absolute terms.
Author understands child psychology.
You can't motivate kids by filling their heads with theory. Instead, make the outcomes of their actions visible to them - then they -motivate themselves- to learn how to improve those outcomes. Add in some friendly peer-competition and you're golden!
However, I think that's the easier part of being an investor. The more complicated part is risk management. With a savings account, there is basically zero risk. But that's not how you invest these days.
It's not zero risk:
- Your currency may collapse, see Germany 1930s, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Venezula, etc.
- Only a certain figure is protected in savings, though governments will act aggressively to protect that (see 2008 + the Icelandic/UK/Dutch palava)
A agree, that the currency is not a 100% safe investment. Inflation especially makes it bad for long-term savings. Indeed, money in any savings account is insured only up to a certain amount. However, that's not something you can explain to kids with a "virtual account." I suppose the idea that Daddy's bank will go bankrupt is probably not an ideal way to teach kids financial literacy.
I used to know an adult who only cared about that number going up, despite making more than a comfortable amount of money. Live with parents, save on rent/mortgage, number goes up faster. Buy cheapest food, take leftovers from work-catered lunches, number goes up faster. Scam your way into being hired for a position you are severely underqualified for, get terminated after three months, keep the salary and sign-on bonus, number goes up. Invest pretty much everything (because there are almost no expenses), compound interest.
And to be fair, investing does not apply to most people either.
I knew I wanted to save a lot for my future and retirement since I was in high school. I didn’t gain any reasonable ability to do so until much later.
A much better life skill in my opinion would be to teach about budgeting, how to cook economical meals, how to avoid debt traps and lifestyle inflation.
How about offering a range of rates with volatility increasing as rate increases. Then they can think about the benefit of guaranteed return vs the benefit of long-term growth, or a combination of both.
Another add to the feature request list :)
However if they see their pension balance fall in a big correction, they can panic and move to less volatile investments, thus reducing their long term gains.
You can theorize all you want but the best way to learn to cope with this is for it to happen to you so it would be great to include it in the simulation!
That is wildly misleading. Investing is super important, but it shouldn't be described in this fairy-tale way. Young people might be misled into trusting investment advisors/counselors/brokers, whose real goal is to enrich themselves at your expense. In fact, there are adults who haven't yet learned this.
An article about investing that doesn't mention the WSJ dartboard contest isn't worth reading -- essentially, over 14 years, random stock picks produced returns equal to those of stockbrokers, before the stockbroker's fees and other costs were subtracted.
An investment counselor's primary goal is to make you think you need his services. His secondary goes is to keep you from performing your own research to discover that is false.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://localhost:8080/en/dinversiones" />
I have set up a similar Google sheet for my 12 yo, which is shared with him on view-only mode. He loves the idea that he's earning $$ every day out of his savings. He's on fire to grow his investment to the point that he earns $5 every day, "while sleeping". He's currently making ~$2/day.
Are they actually investing anything? If so, wouldn’t the app for the brokerage do this with real numbers?
https://calcwithdec.dev/posts/pictures-pensions/
I intentionally didn't include numbers at all - they are a bit more effort to interpret.
A visualization might be a nice feature for kids (but it probably depends on the kid!)
One note: I noticed when opening the installed PWA in airplane mode, styles didn't load. You might be interested in this article on PWA caching from MDN:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
Or alternatively, your kids can see their money going up and down in value randomly, giving them constant anxiety if they're gonna lose it all while the US president uses the stock market as a pump and dump scheme.
Even better is that you can save medical receipts throughout your life and withdraw all that money for any purpose in the future without paying income tax on it.
Now if only there’s an app that can teach delayed gratification.
Especially the opening line:
"“What comes with the milk, leaves with the soul” — Russian proverb."
I love a good proverb. This one goes hard.
> What comes with the milk, leaves with the soul.
I mean of course I understand that the phone can be removed by the suction mount, but thus also defeats the idle infotainment concept.
Also seen screen burn in...
“The first national bank of dad” is a book that suggests a similar approach and I believe it also advocates a 15% interest rate.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...
And on top of that there's huuuuuuuuge variance over time. You have to scale in and out of the market over a very long time to actually get the ~7%. Any one time investment is just a straight up gamble. It's only in aggregate over a long time that you get something somewhat reliable. But then the numbers aren't that impressive. I understand why people are so fond of buying bigger or second houses instead. It's a shame because it drives up the price of housing making it less available for our young. We're basically saving for our future by robbing the future of our young. It's pretty dark to be honest.
Effective interest rate is something like 7-10%
> As my eldest son’s birthday was approaching, we suggested that instead of asking for physical gifts, he ask for their equivalent in money. That way, he gathered a decent amount of capital for his first investment adventure.
Yes, why would you want a toy or a book? Why waste time having fun or learning? You could instead watch a number go up slowly while you do nothing. Fun for the whole family, seconds at a time!
> Each day, as they watch their small fund grow, they grasp the magic of compound interest — and that, more than any gift, is a lesson I hope will stay with them for life.
This feels like raising finance dude bros and gambling addicts. There is no “magic” to compound interest, no one should have “watch money accumulate” as a life goal.
yeah definitely no learning happening here
> You could instead watch a number go up slowly while you do nothing.
and then...spend it on something nice?
> This feels like raising finance dude bros and gambling addicts.
This is a super reactive take speaking from no experience whatsoever. My own parents did something like this for us when we were in elementary/middle school and it taught me restraint in spending, not the opposite.
Then orchestrate an artificial bubble and crash
When older we can teach them what capitalism considers as investment. Capitalism is a longer word for greed. Money doesn’t work. Employees do. Customers pay. Both suffer to make greedy persons rich.
Give them a piggy bank. Teaches the concept of preparation.
To avoid things becoming evil, you just need to make sure that your interactions with other are cooperative and not zero sum, and not all investments are zero sum.
That's to say, I strongly disagree. It's almost never too early to teach this to children. As soon as children know money could be spent on exchange for things, they should begin to think about how money is made.
I don't want to work until I'm dead. If that makes me greedy, so be it.
Do you deduct short term and long term capital gains taxes?
Can we stop with this myth? Most states require financial literacy courses to graduate. The reason it feels like it isn't happening is because it's boring and most just don't pay attention or absorb the lessons.
Prior to 2020 only 8 states required a standalone financial literacy class. So a good percentage of people from the US on here probably didn't have to.
There were also states that had it integrated with another course but I'd question if they were any good. My state was like that and all we did was a 2 week project where we pretended to trade stocks starting with $1k. Which didn't even include things like dividends, short vs long term capital gains tax, etc...
We weren't taught basic things like budgeting, planning for emergencies, how loans and interest work, how taxes work, how credit scores work and affect you, etc...
What's a state? Pretty sure we don't have those here.
Even if it was true for America (probably not), it certainly isn't true for the entire rest of the world.
Maybe they should be teaching Geography.
