Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle
Hey, it's Andy from talking to teens, it would mean the world to us. If you could leave us a five star review, reviews on Apple and Spotify help other parents find the show. And that helps us keep the lights on.

Thanks for being a listener. And here's the show. You're listening to talking to teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers.

I'm your host, Andy Earle. We're here today with Maya korabik, talking about how to teach your teens investing. Interestingly, money is a topic that is often harder for parents to talk about even then sex, something about money is really difficult to discuss. And especially for kids and teenagers. Investing often feels like something that's not really on their radar that feels unattainable. How do you introduce them to the ideas of investing and really get them started in their relationship with

money in a positive way, Maya is the author of From piggy banks to stocks, The Ultimate Guide for a young investor, she has created a thriving community online of families who are all devoted to the idea of teaching their kids about investing. She's built a huge platform on social media, and also a whole series of resources for parents and kids to learn more about how investing works and to get started themselves. Really, really excited to speak to my today about all that and a whole lot more. Maya, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Maya Corbic
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Andy Earle
My pleasure. Yeah, I can't wait. This is I think it'd be really an interesting conversation. I've got this book of yours from piggy banks, to stocks The Ultimate Guide for a young investor. Tell me about this. Where did this originate? How did you get into being to kind of an expert on this topic,

Maya Corbic
I am actually originally from Bosnia, I emigrated because of the war in Bosnia. And I emigrated with my two parents and a brother, with two suitcases and $50. We lost everything in the war. I lived in government shelters, government housing, I had two part time jobs when I was a teenager, you know, kind of had to pay for my school supplies, bus tickets, and whatnot. And then I worked really hard to become a CPA. Now, when I was a CPA, I had a lot of clients that were struggling with money, and some of them had six figure income. And I remember thinking, How is it possible that these people make so much money yet they're struggling with it. And then I realized that it really had to do with them never been taught how to properly manage money. And at that time, actually, I was 32 years old, and I had two children, or I have two children. But at the time, my children were six and four years old. And also at that time, when I was 32, my husband and I ended up paying $60,000 of our student loans and car loans, and we ended up paying off our mortgage. So we were debt free. So it was a huge accomplishment. And I realized that I didn't really have to work, I didn't really have to do nine to five anymore. So I decided that I wanted to do something else with my life. And that was really to help people become better with money. And I realized that the best way to do that is to teach kids so I started experimenting on my own kids are kind of trying to see what works, what doesn't. And this was 11 years ago, I actually started because of what I was doing with my own kids, other parents started asking me to help them and very soon I was doing workshops in schools. But then COVID happened and I couldn't do that anymore. So I started expanding my business more online. So I do a lot of like online workshops for schools. But it's been 11 years that I've been doing that and teaching our kids how to save money, how to spend it smartly or budget is all great. One thing that everybody struggles with and one thing that everyone is intimidated, I won't say everyone but most people are intimidated with is investing in order to grow our wealth. We need to learn how to invest, because when we invest, our money is working for us. So we could be sleeping, we could be on the beach, but the money is doing all the heavy lifting of the wealth creation. And my goal with this book was to simplify investing in with a language that a 10 year old can understand with lots of pictures. It's super easy. So when I was testing this book, I had families go through it and it was actually parents that came to me and said thank you. I finally understand the stock market. I understand investing. It's not as crazy intimidating as I thought it was

Andy Earle
Feels like unattainable or something you think about investing, it's something really rich people do something old people do. It doesn't even feel like yeah, as a kid or as a teenager like, that's, that's something that I could be doing it. I think for a lot of kids, it's really just not even on your radar, that what I mean, how do you how do you even kind of just plant the seed or get the get the idea to kind of start it in their mind that, that that's something that that they could be doing. A lot of times

Maya Corbic
when we teach kids about money, we teach them to spend less, right, and we're focusing on that consumerism. But with investing, we can actually teach our kids that they don't necessarily need to just be consumers. They can be investors and owners, when you're an investor, you're essentially own the business that you're investing in. So for example, and I'm just giving, like the companies that I'm going to mention, these are by no means or suggestions. So you know what, you should be investing in some smart advice. That's right, not investment advice. Exactly. It's more like, just to give you an idea, so most kids have iPhones or cell phones, right. So some of them have Apple Watches, some of them have iPads. So instead of just being consumers and using these products, they can invest in Apple, right, they can own a piece of apple. Same thing with Disney, my kids, when they were little one thing we used to do with them is that for every birthday, and every Christmas, we would actually in addition to like a gift, whatever, we would buy them a share of a company that they knew when they understood. So they felt proud that they were owners of Disney, they didn't own a lot of it, but they own some of it, right? So every time they are paid for, like a plush toy from a Disney Store, they're kind of like, okay, well, I guess I'm earning a little bit of that money back. It's just like switching the mindset, it's thinking about it a little bit differently.

Andy Earle
What a great gift to give kids ownership and something that will they can hold on to, and they start kind of growing in it. Because also just to kind of get I think it changes your attitude or changes your mindset. And it's it's a lot more than just a piece of paper or a share. It's like it's thinking in a whole different way. It's Oh, yeah, now I'm, I'm, I'm an owner. Yeah, I'm an investor. It's like an identity that you're giving to them. And it's really powerful.

Maya Corbic
Yeah. And I think what I would like to do with this book is kind of shake up the original way, we used to think about investing and like what you just mentioned, right now, change mindsets, I really would love for everybody to start thinking about investing differently. Investing is for all of us, you don't need to be rich, you don't need to be older, you don't need to have a lot of money. And I want to remove the taboo, where a lot of us don't feel comfortable talking about money, I want us to talk about it, and feel comfortable with it. Because we can learn from each other. When we talk about money when we have these kinds of conversation, what

Andy Earle
are kind of some of the biggest challenges in sort of getting kids started with investing,

Maya Corbic
I think it's a finding that language that's appropriate. So we need to talk to them at a level that they understand. So I usually like to tell parents is that I if I'm talking to let's say a 10 year old, I try to explain something, I pretend that I have a 10 year old and that's kind of how I explain things. And I don't go into details too much, because sometimes they don't want the details. And also one thing parents need to realize when they're teaching their kids about money, just because you explain something once it doesn't mean that they got it, you will have to repeat it over and over again. I like to compare it to a personal hygiene when they come inside the house. You tell them wash your hands, wash your hands, like you keep repeating that for I don't even know how many years and at some point in time, they finally start doing it on their own. So this is this is kind of the same thing. You start off and you don't give them too much information like you just give them enough information that keeps them interested. If they ask questions, you can answer them, but leave it at that. And then next time there is an opportunity for you to I guess every day opportunities, life opportunities to talk to your kids about money about investing, you don't need to create any special lessons. It's just we're making it part of everyday life.

Andy Earle
What do you think like are some of the key concepts that kids need to understand kind of before they're ready to start investing? Or is there sort of like some groundwork that you need to lay or some foundational kind of teachings that you need to go through?

Maya Corbic
Oh, absolutely. I actually recommend that we start teaching kids about money earlier and there are some money lessons that they need to learn ahead of time. So for example, with let's say when the child is four or five year old, you can start teaching them about the difference between needs and wants. I've I've taught this to kindergartens. Unfortunately, some adults struggle with this. But kids at that age, they're very smart. And they can understand that needs are things we need for survival wants are things we don't need for survival, but are nice to have. And we spend our money on needs first. And if there's any leftover, we will spend it on once, and kids are really smart that way. So they get that I also recommend that you think about whether or not you want to implement allowance. Allowance is essentially a tool, it's not a gift that usually people think it's a gift, essentially, with the allowance, you're transferring the purchasing responsibility from you on to them. So now they're the ones deciding whether or not they should get that toy or candy. And they can learn a lot of good lessons with allowance, how to save money, how to donate it, how to spend it smartly. And there's a lot of these lessons that we need to go through first, before we start really talking about investing. While these lessons are happening simultaneously, you can invest on behalf of your child, but when you invest on behalf of a four year old, and you buy the machinery of Disney, they may not necessarily clue in until like much later on. But nevertheless, I still encourage parents to do this to invest on behalf of their kids if they can afford.

Andy Earle
Is it pretty? Just obvious or easy to explain just the idea of owning a stock or owning a piece of a company and, and like that, that is gonna go up in value? Or how how that works? Or I mean, just I guess simple things like interest or how the I guess just the idea of how your money can be working for you is kind of yet it seems, it seems basic. But I think as a kid, it's like kind of a foreign concept like how What do you mean, how could it be working for me when it's not? What I'm not doing anything? I don't get it.

Maya Corbic
I mean, one thing that I did with my children when they were little before we started, I mean, I was investing in, in stock market on their behalf. But before actually really started teaching them about stocks. And some of the savings that they had we invested in term deposits, we went to the bank, and they actually before that they had to save they had savings account. And I did this first with my son because he was older. And I showed them the statement account from his savings account. And I didn't go into details because these things can be very complicated. But I just said, Look, this is how much money you had. And I think maybe he had $1,000, I can remember now it's been a while. But I said okay, based on this money, this is how much interest you got. And it was something ridiculous. It was like 60 cents for the whole year. Now the interest rates are a little bit better. So now maybe it would be a little bit more. But I was like I was explaining to him, I said, Listen, if you actually put this money into a term deposit, which is very safe, it's not stock market, there's a guaranteed amount that you're going to get back. That's what we did. And the way I explained that to him, it's basically I said, it's kind of like you're lending money to the bank. And I think he was maybe eight or nine and at that point in time, he understood what lending or borrowing meant. So I use the examples from his life like you know, you would befriend would borrow a toy from you. And then a friend would return the toy to you when they're done playing with it. But in this case, the bank is borrowing money. And because the bank is using that money, so that they can operate, they can make more money, they want to reward you. So they will give you a little bit of extra money. And that's called interest. Okay, that money that you earn is just because you let you bought you let the bank borrow your money. Oh, he understood that. And I believe that we made, I think in that first year, maybe we made $60 on that 1000, which still wasn't much right.

Andy Earle
Better than 60 cents.

Maya Corbic
Yeah. And then I say now, you can make even more money if you invest in the stock market. But it can be risky, there is a chance of you losing money. So we have to pick investments that align with your goals and your risk profile, so that you can earn more money, I would I guess stock market investments. I was just trying to tell them that at this point in time now we're not lending money to the bank, we are actually lending money to the companies like we're giving this money and we're buying basically a piece of a company. So in the book, actually there is an example where a kid starts a lemonade stand, and he's doing really well. And he wants to expand that business. So in order to expand that business, he needs capital, he needs to buy more drugs, he needs to buy more lemons, more sugar, but he doesn't have money. And these other kids actually in the book, say okay, you can we'll be your investors. We'll give you some of our saved money, but we want some of the profits later on. So essentially, that's really what investing is. A lot of times people think that investing is gambling, but every time we invest, we're essentially betting on that company that we're in Investing in we're betting on that business. And I always tell people that they should not be investing in companies, they don't understand if you don't understand what you're investing in, if you don't understand the business and how it operates, you should not be investing in it.

Andy Earle
When I was a kid, I used to do a lot of yard work, you know, we had a little neighborhood that we lived in, we go around to our neighbors and pass out flyers, my brother and I would have this little kind of yard working business. And we could do mow people's lawns or weed their gardens and stuff like that. But I was talking to a friend recently, and he did something similar but But what he did is he saved up a bunch of money, and he bought his own lawn more. And then he started getting clients to to be part of his lawn mowing business and hiring his friends to use his lawn mower to go mow the lawn. And now all of a sudden, he's making money when he's not doing the work. And and that's because he owns the means of production. He he's he made he invested in buying this lawn more that would allow him to scale his business beyond just selling his time for money, which I never got to that point. And I think it's yeah, it's like, just really, such a powerful idea that he learned from such an early age by just thinking about something that he was already doing something that I was already doing that I could have thought about. But But I but I didn't, I never made that connection that hey, I could actually kind of grow this business. If I if I invest a little bit of money into it, I think yeah, there's there's so many different different ways that we can kind of help help kids understand how investing works, and how they could be investing in even just little little businesses have long their friends or things like that, too,

Maya Corbic
right. And that's what you're talking about is passive income. And I'm really passionate about teaching kids how to earn passive income. So that's same as you I did not learn about it. I only learned about it much, much later on in life. I wish about that. I learned that earlier. Because it's all about setting up systems to work for you. And you can be on vacation, you can be sleeping, you can be doing whatever you want. But you were the one that said that the system and essentially you are employing people, you're giving jobs, and you're getting rewarded for it. So I think it's absolutely wonderful what your friend figured out. And I'm trying to teach as many young kids about just again, it's the mindset, it's the mindset shift. I'm trying to teach as many young people to think that way. And

Andy Earle
once you get that, then you can just start to see so many more possibilities of all of a sudden, it's like, wow, there's investment opportunities everywhere.

Exactly, exactly. Jim

Rohn talks about teaching kids to have two bikes, one to ride one to rent. How long does it take before you make your money back? Yeah, love that. What? What anything that we need to kind of warn them about you mentioned kind of, with your son talking about, hey, that what's your risk level? Or that seems like also, maybe a little bit of a difficult concept to grasp or something, it's like, well, I want to whatever one's gonna make me the most money. I want the best, the highest one. But But of course, with higher potential return is going to also come with a higher possibility that you could not not return anything.

Maya Corbic
Right. So it's I think it's I'm glad that you brought this up, because very often I get questions, especially on my Instagram platform from a lot of my followers, or what should they invest in? And it's a fully loaded question, because if you hear somebody telling you, I think you shouldn't invest in ABCD stock run the opposite way. Because deciding what you or your child should be investing in, really depends on so many different factors. And it's these are not really difficult to determine. It's just that everyone's portfolio investment portfolio should be different. It should depend on your goals. So the what are your goals? Like? Are they longterm? Are they short term? Because if you're investing for short term, you may not want to invest in something risky, you may in indeed invest in some term deposit. Perhaps a bond? yes, maybe no, I don't know depends on how soon you want to reach your goal. Like if you are planning to use the money a year from now, maybe a term deposit is just a better way to go. But if you're thinking of if you're investing for something that's long term, like from a goal that you want to accomplish 10 years from now or even longer, then they are different investment vehicles that people can be investing in. And one of them that I are actually two of them that I found out much later on in life again, this is one of those things that I wish I had learned about earlier. They're called index funds and ETFs. And I love them because they provide immediate diversification and they also have very low fees. Again, there are many different ones out there, you just have to pick the one that's right for you. But with these as long as you're are educated about investing, you really don't even need a financial advisor. Not to say that doesn't mean that financial advisors are bad, like financial advisors are good, especially if you have the right one, they're giving you the right rate of return. They're following up with you, they have experience. But sometimes people get burned by financial advisors, then there's things to look at such as your risk profile, and we don't all tolerate the risk the same way, there are a lot of free questionnaires online, you can just Google them, you can just type in a free investment risk profile questionnaire, and you can use any one of them. They're usually on the websites of these big investment firms like Vanguard or fidelity, and you can do them for free. And then you will know, okay, am I medium risk and high risk, low risk, and that can actually help you figure out what kind of investments you should be choosing. And then the last thing is that depending on what it is that you are investing for, you may also choose a different type of account for children, you have different accounts, you do have the 529 plan, which where you can actually invest money and it's invested for your child's education, then there is a custodial Roth IRA, you can invest money in there, but the money has to be earned by the child. So there's a lot I mean, we could talk about this, but there's so much to be said about that. And then there's you TMA and you GMA accounts. So the reason why I'm mentioning all this, is that when you decide to invest, you also have to choose Okay, what am I investing for, and which of these accounts is the best account for me to invest in. And if you're from a different country, I'm sure like, I'm from Canada. So in Canada, we have different accounts, we have RSP account, or we have interest custodial accounts. So we will be choosing one of those because a lot of it goes into deciding how to invest what to invest in. So if somebody just tells you go invest into this stock, buy it with, a lot of times people will go and buy, because everybody wants to get rich quickly. I end that's possible. It's rare. But I'm more in like Get Rich Slowly. And certainly theme.

Andy Earle
We're here today with Maya korabik, talking about how to teach your teen to be an investor. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Maya Corbic
When you save your money, the money is really used by the bank, the bank is investing that money. So why don't you invest that money and earn money, right? Or more money than whatever the bank is giving you on your savings account? Because that money is being used by someone and that someone is the bank? Investing is not difficult. It does require a little bit of effort. But it's not that hard. But whatever you do, I think you still have to get educated because even if you have an advisor, you want to be educated enough to ask intelligent questions, because you don't want to just hand over your money to someone you don't know what they're doing with your money. And also, you want to understand what kind of fees they're going to be charging you. By the time they're teenagers, they really need to start investing more. They're fully capable at that point to understand how stock market work and they can actually understand it when it comes to opening up accounts. One thing I would suggest for anyone is if this is your first time investing and you don't know what you're doing, and you're just learning to not invest large sums of money.

Andy Earle
Want to hear the full episode, head over to talking to teens.com/register. For a free trial of our premium podcast, you get exclusive access to loads of great content with no obligation and your membership supports the work we do here at talking to teens get started today with a free trial over at talking to teens.com/registered Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.