INSPIRATION FOR TODAY:

"Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow."  

~ from "The Matchmaker" by Thornton Wilder

LEARNING AND EARNING!

A fresh year and a fresh start. Time to size everything up and rearrange our plans for the future. If you have children, maybe 2008 will be the year that you begin to prepare them for their future by beginning their ³economic education.²

In this age of debit and credit cards, Internet shopping and in-your-face advertising, an excellent place to start is by teaching your kids the difference between ³saving² and ³investing.² They might ³save² for a short-term goal like buying the latest X-Box game, and they might ³invest² toward a long-term goal like college.

You can make it fun for everyone by setting up a ³mock portfolio,² containing companies your children are already familiar with, like McDonalds, Disney and Nike. With that done, show them how to find the stock prices in the newspaper or on the web. Perform some weekly monitoring for a few months, so they can learn to observe market trends.

Once they¹ve got their brains around the concepts of diversification, liquidity and the relationship between risk and reward, you and your financial prodigy may be ready to open a mutual fund. Some are actually designed for young investors and provide educational materials.

If you don¹t know enough about investing to teach your child, then this will be a great project for both of you! Franklin Roosevelt observed that ³happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.² By making investing fun and creative, you can encourage children (and yourself) to be more involved. It¹s never too early or too late to begin, and if you haven¹t already, then make 2008 the year to do so!