Boy Scout Merit Badge – Personal Management
May 12, 2012
Both of my sons are Boy Scouts. One is working hard to become an Eagle Scout in the very near future. In order to become an Eagle Scout, every Boy Scout is required to complete a minimum number of merit badges. The Scout is also required to complete some specific merit badges, including the Personal Management Merit Badge.
You can find the Personal Management Merit Badge here: http://meritbadge.org/wiki/index.php/Personal_Management
Since my son, Jonathan, has been working through this badge, I also have become familiar with it. I think it is a great tool for any parent to teach more about money to her kid. The badge teaches about and reviews a number of topics, including:
- Making a major family purchase
- Budgeting
- General sentiments about money
- Saving and investing
- The stock market
- Credit and debt
- Future career
If you need some ideas regarding money lessons to work on with your kids, take a stab at this merit badge. We will talk about some of these things here in the next few weeks.
Justine
Max discusses virtual stock investing at updown.com
June 20, 2009
Guest column today from my eleven-year-old….
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Hi, my name is Max. I am Justine’s younger son.
My mom has discovered this site called UPDOWN.com. It is a website that simulates what happens in the real stock market. When you create your account, you are given 1 million “dollars” to invest in different companies. The stocks go up and down just like the real stock market so that you can learn how to manage money in the stock market. You can look at all of any company’s financial information to see which company is the most hopeful so that you can buy that company and enlarge your portfolio. You can buy as much stock as you want with the 1 million “dollars” so that you are not limited to certain companies.
I know what it is like to have a real portfolio because my mom introduced me to the stock market at age six. Now I am eleven so getting a birthday present of stock money is classic now that I have been in the stock market for five years. Being in the stock market actually can be fun, too. It is almost like gambling except you can pull out of the deal if you are losing too much money. My mom has taught me the basics about buying stock such as only buying stock when the market is down, which makes right now one of the best times to buy stock, and to buy the stock that is fairly small since those are the kinds of stocks that will have that bigger margins of change. Investing in the stock market is one of the smartest things you could do with extra money you might have that you are not really using. It teaches you how to manage your money and it gives you a great experience.
Max
Max’s Birthday – It’s all about money.
April 28, 2009
Max celebrated his 11th birthday yesterday. Max asked for two things for his birthday: a new watch and $150 for his stock trading account. Now that is easy!
We celebrated Max’s birthday by going out to a family dinner and having a birthday cake at home. Max actually got his watch a few weeks ago, for a camping trip. So now we just have to follow through on the cash for the stocks.
What is great about this gift is that it’s not just about the cash and buying stocks. It’s about spending time together. This weekend, while everyone else is away, Max and I will sit down on the computer together and log into his stock trading account. We will make a deposit into his account from my checking account. And then we will go shopping for stocks together.
Max has been getting some good practice in trading stocks by playing on a website called UpDown.com. I have a feeling when Max and I sit down together this weekend, he will be telling ME a thing or two about which stocks he should buy, since he’s been trading quite a bit on UpDown.com.
So I am really looking forward to looking at his portfolio again with him and finding some new stocks for him to buy. We haven’t done this in a few months, so it will be a good exercise for us to do together. And it will be a great way for me to continue to build my relationship with my younger son.
Max received a few checks for his birthday, as well. Both sets of grandparents sent him checks. He loves getting checks because he likes putting the money into his savings accounts. But he also got a Target gift card from his aunt. So he likes to spend money at his birthday, as well.
So along with shopping for new stocks, Max has also asked that we go to Target and find some ways to spend the gift cards burning a hole in his pocket.
I am looking forward to a one-on-one weekend with Max. And helping him learn just a little bit more about money.
Justine
Time to get a stock for the kid
October 14, 2008
Well, it has been quite a ride in the stock market. Everyone’s stock in anything is down, significantly.
But I think that presents a learning opportunity for your child. While we discuss many aspects of money in the blog, and we are trying to cover some simple topics, such as saving, right now, I think it is time to think about talking more about stocks with your kids.
We are living in momentous times. Stocks took the largest dive in a week, EVER, last week. That is some living history that you can teach your kids.
And there are some folks in the media out there who believe that this is a great time to buy stocks. An article in the New York Times yesterday commented on how the company Newell Rubbermaid is priced as if it were going out of business.
So this might be an interesting time for a kid to put some money into the stock market. If you have a stock that you like, you should talk to your child about it. If you know nothing about stocks, think about a company that is near you and do some investigation to see if you and your child should buy a share or two.
This could be an interesting time to buy a stock with your child because there is a good chance that the stock will go up. And a kid always loves to see her stock go up. Of course, it could also go down. But with just $100 in a stock, maybe as an early birthday present, maybe there isn’t too much to lose?
It sure would be a great way to get some experience in the stock market for your child. And years from now, you both will say, “Remember when, in 2008?”
Max’s Stock Portfolio and the Bear Market
October 2, 2008
Boy, we have all been taking a beating in the stock market. And a beating in the stock market is even more unnerving when your kid is in it with you.
Or is it?
Max, my youngest of my three kids, has a little stock portfolio. Actually, all three of my kids have little stock portfolios. But Max is the most interested of the three kids in the stock market. You’ve seen so far in this blog that Hannah and Jon are good at saving money. Max isn’t that great at saving money, but he does enjoy investing in the stock market. Hannah and Jon are less interested in the stock market. All kids are different.
I am writing about the stock market today, though, to get the topic on the table. And also because Ford had some pretty tough announcements yesterday and Max owns Ford stock. He bought the stock about a year ago at $8 and now it is trading at around $4.50.
The fun of investing with your kids, though, is that, to them, ‘it’s just money.’ They take the losses a little less seriously than we do. And that perspective can help lessen the load when you are looking at your own decimated portfolio.
Max doesn’t watch his stocks that regularly, but he has a general idea of where they are trading. And he knows he has lost money over the past several months. But I teach Max generally about the stock market and he knows that the market will go back up again. One day.
Max is also chalking all of this up to experience. He figures that his investing experience and his endurance of this bear market will make for good stories when he is trying to get into college or looking for a job after college. Max doesn’t regard these experiences now as opportunities to make him a more seasoned investor when he grows up, but that is how I look at it. When Max, or even the other kids, are playing in the stock markets thirty years from now, he can always reflect on how he lived through the bear market of 2008 and chalk that up to experience. And I think that these experiences now, as a kid, will make him a more seasoned and successful investor when he grows up.
Are you kids invested in stocks? If not, think about getting them into stocks. I started each of my kids in the stock market when they were about six or seven years old. We opened accounts online for them to trade in. For a specific example, my kids hold accounts at www.TDAmeritrade.com.
We started the kids with $150 each and we let them pick the stocks. We encourage them to invest following Peter Lynch’s most famous investment principle of, “Invest in what you know.”
So the kids usually pick stocks that make sense to them. This is why Max picked Ford Motor Company a while back. Max was already invested in a Japanese car company because our family drives Japanese cars. But then Max thought he’d like to give an American car company a chance. So he picked Ford, based on some parameters that felt good to him, such as current news stories and the Price/Earnings multiple.
Max certainly has learned a lot about market timing. That is something that is hard for anyone to learn without the experience of living it. So we are giving Max that opportunity of learning through living the experience of investing in the stock market with real money.
It’s a bit challenging now. But I believe it will pay off in the long term.
