Introducing Finance and Investing to Young Kids
By:Atticus Seale
In today’s schools there might be a ceramics or drama class, and although fun, these classes aren't essential or lifelong skills. There are other class options that would be much more beneficial in the long term, such as finance. Having a class will help students become future leaders in finance. Also, investing is somethings many people do, and is a great way to gain money and use your brain. School leaders should create a finance class in their schools because finance is a lifelong skill.
Finance is something every person will have to do at some point in their life, and like in math, it is something that if you start early, it will be something that will stay with you forever. Finance is not only doing your taxes, but also learning how to spend money wisely. Learning finance early will help students have more knowledge, confidence, and effectiveness in doing their personal finance. Having the knowledge of personal finance can not only help you be successful but also can make you able to teach others about personal finance and help them understand. Having a good amount of confident about finance can help stress over things like paying taxes or from having stress about taxes, even before you start paying taxes. Confidence also leads into effectiveness. Being confident can help you be more effective when investing or doing taxes. Understanding how to do taxes and having confidence can make you not stress and increase the productivity of your personal finance.
Today's world has many small tech startups and large companies like Amazon and Google, so investing is very important. Investing is allocating money to something in the expectation of some benefit in the future. In finance, the benefit from an investment is called a return. Understanding how to invest your money is a very good skill. You don’t have to be over 18 to invest, but if you aren't, you will have to open a custodial account. That means an adult must open the account with you and be the custodian. When you buy shares of stock you'll have to pay the broker a fee. This means that learning to invest at a young age is important because you don't have to be over 18 students can start investing at a young age witch will help students understand more in the future.
A common opinion is that kids would make an ill-advised investment, like investing in something without researching the stock or watching it. And yes, some 13 year old who likes a subject would probably make an investment in a failing stock relating to that. But if this 13 year old had taken a class on investing, they would realize that investing in something only because you like the produce is probably not a good idea. Another argument is that kids would not know what to spend the money on and would start buying things like pounds of candy or a soda machine. So if kids understood how to invest or had a good example and learned how to spend money, they would not make these decisions and end up wasting money.
In conclusion, students should have the option to take a financial class provided by their school. These classes should teach the students how to invest and manage their personal finance. The reason for this is so that the students can become more confident about their finance in the future, and investing is such a large thing in today's world. Many parents already give their children allowances, why not teach them how to use it?
