(How to Help Your Kids be Millionaires …when you aren’t rich.)
In This Episode: Can children have Uncommon Sense? Let me tell you the story of Colin Flynn, and then see what you think.

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* To help support Uncommon Sense, see the Patron’s Page, or the form in the sidebar.
* Yes, I’m aware that there’s no “Roth IRA” in other countries, but I can’t keep up on all the possibilities worldwide, and expect that you will “translate” the concepts discussed to the options in your country.
* Yes, I’m aware that there are some taxes withheld from kids, such as Social Security and Medicare. For this situation, I reimbursed the kids for what was withheld so that a full $50 went into each of their retirement accounts.
* The compound interest figures are from the Investor.gov calculator.
* I used this report on the Bank of America survey from CNBC.

Transcript
Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.
Most kids — at least the boys — want a Nintendo for Christmas, and maybe some Nike gear, or an Apple product. For Christmas 2018, Colin Flynn of Woodbury, New Jersey, wanted something different: he asked his parents for money so he could buy …stocks.
Shares of companies, I mean. “It was pretty much the only thing he asked for that year,” says his mother, Kerri Sullivan.
So how the heck did he even think of wanting that? On a family trip to Disneyland, Colin, his mother says, “saw a statue of Walt Disney and asked me about it. Somehow, it led to a conversation about Disney being a publicly traded company, which led to a follow-up discussion about the stock market.”
“From there,” she continues, she and the boy “researched the stock market and investing, and we found answers to his many, many questions. His interest piqued, the conversations continued, which led to him adding ‘money to invest in the stock market’ to his Christmas wish list.”
Colin doesn’t just panhandle his parents for his investment money: he gets an allowance — if he does his chores. When he got his start on this, Colin was just 10 years old.
After Christmas, with cash in hand, Colin started to buy stocks. Sure enough, he invested in Nintendo, Nike, and Apple. And also Tesla, Starbucks, Chipotle, Uber, Amazon, Google, and — unfortunately! — Boeing.
About here, maybe you’re starting to think that Colin is from a rich family and you’ll never be able to compete with his resources, even though he’s “just a kid.” If you’re thinking that, you’re wrong! Over the first year, Colin invested just $420. Do you think you could come up with $420 over the course of a year to help secure your future, even if your future isn’t as far away as Colin’s? If you have the means to listen to podcasts, you almost certainly could. And then put this into the mix: do you have children, or grandchildren?
At the end of the first year, Colin’s $420 stock portfolio was worth $539 and change — a gain of 28.37 percent.