Investing

Investing is about building wealth, and it can help you prepare for the future. By investing, you give yourself the chance to create a rich harvest, giving yourself the resources you need to pursue your dreams and to take care of loved ones.

From Vanguard: May want to find a way to cover up the ending balances after 30 years.  Question: Two investors start with $100,000 and earn a 6% return per year for 30 years: One chooses a low-cost mutual fund with a cost of 0.25% (a.k.a. expense ratio) that is applied to their invested assets each year. Note that many index funds have even LOWER expense ratios).  The other chooses a higher-cost mutual fund of 0.63%, which is apparently the weighted average expense ratio for U.S. mutual funds.

Index Funds offer an intoxicating promise: lower fees, diversified risk and better returns. But is there a dark side to their astonishing rise?

Learn how parents, grandparents and other family members can jumpstart their children's retirement.

Both traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs can be opened for kids of any age, and the benefits range from the savings themselves to learning about money.

How long will it take you to save up for retirement? This interactive early retirement calculator will estimate your retirement age for a range of inputs.

Hat tip to Jessica for finding this resource which allows students to tweak variables to find out how much they can save through D-I-Y coffee. It also provides opportunities to discuss investing as one of the variables is "investment return."  Here are the variables (the dark rectangles are calculated fields while the white rectangles are user-generated:  For those students who don't drink coffee, they can identify something they might buy several times a week (e.g. snacks) and Put in $0.01 for the bag (retail value)  Input the cost of that item purchased in the cup (retail v...

Answer: Pepsi Questions What factors do you think contribute to the very different market performance of these companies? Which products do you personally prefer?  Would you make an investment decision based on your personal product preference? Pepsi also has diversified into the snack food business and owns Doritos, Cheetos and Sun Chips while Coke has diversified into the coffee business. Knowing this, which company do you think has better long-term prospects?

Good question to show the power of compounding...of course be sure to tell them that no investment would double on a daily basis for 30 days;) Calculators not allowed!  Answer: Starting with a penny and doubling it every day compounds to $10.7 million after 30 days Day 1: You would have $0.02 Day 2: You would have $0.04 Day 3: You would have $0.08 Day 4: You would have $0.16... Day 30: You would have $10,737,418.24. Questions: How much would the penny have grown to on Day 29? How much did the value increase between Day 29 and Day 30?  Now apply this concept to your own saving...

Sheet1 Start with a penny and it doubles every day starting on Day 1 Day #,Amount 1,$0.02 2,$0.04 3,$0.08 4,$0.16 5,$0.32 6,$0.64 7,$1.28 8,$2.56 9,$5.12 10,$10.24 11,$20.48 12,$40.96 13,$81.92 14,$163.84 15,$327.68 16,$655.36 17,$1,310.72 18,$2,621.44 19,$5,242.88 20,$10,485.76 21,$20,971.52 22...

Here's an activity I did with my class a few years back that helped simulate the psychological aspects of investing.  It's a pretty simple game with multiple ways that you could extend and increase its complexity. Game Instructions You are starting the game with a fictional balance of $100 This game will have 10 rounds The player with the highest balance after 10 rounds will be the WINNER! Game worksheet  How each round proceeds:  Each student independently decides if they want to be IN or OUT OF THE MARKET and marks their spreadsheet IN or OUT. A classmate will verify that t...

NGPF Activity Bank Behavioral Finance PLAY: Roll with the Market The basic principles of investing may seem simple - “buy low, sell high”, “set it and forget it”, and more. However, the psychology of investing can illuminate why we human beings can sometimes make investing more difficu...

How can we teach students about the stock market when they have no investing experience? I listened to this Masters of Business podcast with Barry Ritholtz interviewing investor and author Joel Greenblatt and picked up a few good ideas. Joel is not only a practitioner (a very successful hedge fund manager) but also an educator having spent the last 20+ years as a professor at Columbia Business School. Joel described the challenges of describing the stock market to a group of 9th graders at a Harlem high school and the ingenious idea he came up (about 48:20-51:00 in podcast): He brought...

The S&P 500 stock price index includes 500 companies. On Friday, five of the six so-called FAANGM stocks (all but Netflix) occupied the top...

Index mutual funds and ETFs have become overwhelmingly popular in the last decade. But are they they best way to invest your serious, long-term money? Keep reading to find out, the answer might surprise you...

We'll pick a random 10-year period and see if you can spot and avoid the downturn.

Edpuzzle video lesson. Make any video your lesson. Take a video and crop it, add your voice or embed questions at any point.

Question of the Day Investing #31 Nike or Under Armour: Which company's stock has performed better over the past five years? www.ngpf.org Last updated: 5/719

Index funds (funds that mimic popular stock market indices like the S&P 500) now have more assets under management then active funds trying to "beat the market."  Per the WSJ:  Funds that track broad U.S. equity indexes hit $4.27 trillion in assets as of Aug. 31, according to research firm Morningstar Inc., giving them more money than stock-picking rivals for the first-ever monthly reporting period. Funds that try to beat the market had $4.25 trillion as of that date.

It's better to panic a little than to panic a lot

We seem to be living in unprecedented times. We always seem to be living in unprecedented times, according to conventional wisdom, mostly b...

Dave Ramsey's investing philosophy isn't complicated and can be replicated by anyone who is interested in investing. Find out how he invests his money!

You don’t need a finance degree or a lot of money to start building wealth. Let’s talk about the commonsense, tried-and-true methods for investing for beginners.