Lessons From Last Week’s Book Signing

Every time I do one of my (rare) book signing, I learn a lot. If it isn’t an insight, it’s what I need to explain better, more or differently. From last week at Mosaic Books, it was:

Making your teenager a millionaire: Your teenage relative won’t do it because you tell them and YOU know it’s guaranteed to work. They won’t listen to you and you can’t want it more for them than they want it for themselves.

A teenager isn’t likely to even listen to you. But maybe they’ll “get it” from the two page Money Tools book chapter. They have to read it and understand compounding works better the younger the person investing. You also have to remember that saving $9,300 is like asking you to come up with a few million bucks. Teenagers dream of $300 bucks and a BIG shopping trip to the mall next week. They don’t dream of $9,300 or anything past next month.

That’s where you come in: The chapter is two pages. When they ‘get it’ and work through the compounding math on their own where $9,300 becomes $18,600 in 7 years and $37,200 in 14 years without them doing anything at all – they’ll get committed. At that point you can also help. Maybe you can match what they save, maybe you can add 10 or 20% to what they save or whatever you can afford to boost the odds it’ll happen.

If you contribute anything at all, the deal should be that the investment account is in joint names. Your money is in there and then it’ll assure they don’t take out anything.

Not knowing this or doing this when I was early 20s or so is now one of the top 5 lifetime regrets of mine – for obvious reasons. And I’ll post the more detailed “how to and where to” invest again.

Spend the $20 on the book – at least make them read it and understand it – think about some seed money to get started or to keep going. THAT is starting a family legacy in ways nobody else does…

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