Before Tim Ranzetta, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, co-founded Next Gen Personal Finance , a nonprofit with a mission to bring personal-financial education to all students, he volunteered to teach a class in personal finance to ninth graders. Their hunger for financial lessons impressed him.
What’s the No. 1 financial lesson you wished you learned at a young age? “Start investing in index funds at as young an age as possible,” Ranzetta told MarketWatch in an interview this week to mark National Financial Literacy Month. “People can get intimidated about buying an individual stock rather than a basket of stocks. But you can’t beat the power of compounding.” Most of compounded interest is reinvested and earns more money.
What was the most surprising thing about your young students? “They were students seeking to be the first in their family to go to college,” Ranzetta said. “There was a ripple effect. I started getting calls from their parents about budgeting and investing. I even accompanied one student’s father to help him open a brokerage account.”
Times have changed since Ranzetta went to college. “There’s never been more exhaustive detail out there to say if I get a B.A. in commerce from the University of Virginia, this is the salary from that school in the short-term and long-term,” he said. “When you’re talking about tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, you have to think about the return on investing.”
“Loss aversion is wired into us. We experience loss at a much greater impact than gains. It’s the same with confirmation bias. No one likes to read negative things about stocks we’re invested in. When we do read something it reinforces our views. So much of our lives have moved online. Social-media companies use that to their advantage.”
Renzetta..Italians are always ahead...😆😆
Unfortunately America will never okay financial literacy classes in high school. Our society relies on folks to be financially illiterate so they can make stupid decisions like taking out school loans etc