HN Reader

There's an awful lot of negativity here, but as someone who's 55 and has earned a good wage since I was 17, I really wish I had taken investing more seriously from the very beginning. While I knew of compound interest, I really didn't understand it until like a decade ago. If I'd started putting 5% of my money into a target retirement plan from 17, I'd be retired now. As it is I'm not doing badly, but I really wish I'd started earlier.

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.

Financial literacy is a gift, and absolutely omitted from standard education, which is unfortunate.

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.

There’s an old story about Rothschild getting a haircut when the barber started giving him stock tips. Rothschild thanked him, left the shop, and immediately sold all his holdings. The reason was: “When even the barber is investing, the market’s gone too far.”

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.”

M dashes everywhere, bold text everywhere ... what's next, teaching them to over-rely on LLM's? And if we're teaching them about investing, can we also teach them about the ethics of investing? As in, employing a bunch of people to direct the profit of their work into the hands of investors?

I run a "Bank of Dad", tracked in a spreadsheet for my kids. They can choose to "invest" their money with me or not. To make investing meaningful for them, I pay 10% interest per month, up to a $50 balance.

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...

Will they also have periods of a bear market and see their money go down ?

Not for the same audience but for much the same idea I made a progressive visualization of saving and compound interest in a blog post about pension saving:

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!)

I wouldn’t want kids to grow up chasing a number. It’s just too reductionist. If you want them to be financially secure, teach them skills and the money will follow. TC obsession is a blight.

Happy to see a PWA. These things need to make a comeback for a variety of reasons.

Being encouraged to invest is nice but having the ability to is a massive luxury.

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.

You forgot to add taxes, market crashes, sanctions, asset depreciation, companies goes bankrupt and other fun things.

> I explained to my kids that investing is like having a magic box that generates more money over time.

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.

you need to add the meta utf8 tag

Be careful with comparing real-life things and experiences with a (virtual) number on a screen, especially for children.

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.

How can you have a localhost reference as canonical? You should fix your jekyll configuration I guess.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://localhost:8080/en/dinversiones" />

Tangentially i can't help but notice a pattern. Generation1 says "build more homes", then they build them and convince Generation2 to invest despite ever climbing real estate prices. Then the internet happens and Generation2 says "build more companies". They build them , and proceed to convince Generation3 to invest in those companies despite ever climbing stock values. Seems like these trends run in cycles

OP, love the idea, and cool to see a useful PWA!

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...

"We're only making plans for Nigel" (XTC, 1979)

> I act as their investment agent, assigning realistic interest rates

Author then proceeds to put 15% annual interest rate...

I had a very similar idea this summer. But my kids are 6 and 8, so I approached it using the video game approach. It's been an absolute smash hit and entirely altered the habits of doing chores in this home. It's been about 3 months and it's still going stronger than ever. The whole thing is a static page, driven by a Google Spreadsheet that Mom and I edit to adjust goals and track progress.

https://ibb.co/RTw5sCDJ https://ibb.co/ycRB8750 https://ibb.co/gLGQ0tKT

Am I missing something? When they went to add money, do you go back in and increase the initial investment?

Are they actually investing anything? If so, wouldn’t the app for the brokerage do this with real numbers?

This is frankly depressing.

> 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.

I can feel the vibe-coding "vibe" from every vibe-coded websites, somehow.

Showing siblings' investment performance side-by-side on a fridge-mounted screen.

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!

Where can I find this 15% annual interest rate?

Good. Financial education is sorely needed for everyone in America.

Now if only there’s an app that can teach delayed gratification.

Found a fun little bug. If you try to type into the date picker, and press backspace, the entire screen blanks out. (MacOS 15.0.1, Safari 18.0.1)

Nice! I also created a "virtual bank account" for my kids when they were 7-8yo. They can choose to take the weekly cash or put it in their savings account. My bank gives them a 5% interest rate per month, which isn't bad. Explaining the idea of compound interest this way is easy.

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.

[redacted]

What's the native version of the opening proverb?

> What comes with the milk, leaves with the soul.

Love this.

Especially the opening line:

"“What comes with the milk, leaves with the soul” — Russian proverb."

I love a good proverb. This one goes hard.

Teach your kids how life is about getting something for nothing. Great parenting.

At the point with investment I was lost. Children should learn to be patient (saving money) and prepare for bad situations (saving money). That’s enough.

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.

But how do you charge the phone?

Wait until they want to divest their portfolio and start hyping meme stocks and shitcoins because number go up faster.

Then orchestrate an artificial bubble and crash

> The phone is attached to the fridge and works as a panel or dashboard where my kids can see their money growing each day.

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.

> One thing that school doesn’t teach you (not even high school) is how to manage your personal finances.

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.

The number one thing people fail to truly take advantage of is the triple tax advantage of HSA accounts. So powerful.

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.

When I started working at 24, a friend of mine (a few years older than me) asked me if our company had a 401(K) and what was the match.

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.

Hi, sorry to be that guys, I just wanted to make some corrections on what you call your app a "plain html file". Your HTML file loads:

- react app - pwa manifest - tailwind css

This is not at all a "plain html" file.

You're giving a 15% growth rate with zero volatility? That isn't going to teach many important lessons.

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.

is 15% realistic?