Recently, with the popularity of investing spiking because of adolescent apps such as Tik Tok, more and more teenagers want to invest. Some videos claim that you can make fifty percent returns per year. Many videos exist showing teenagers making thousands with ease. The wave of hype has led to many teenagers thinking they can hop into the market and make money. However, even though your teenagers is probably very delusional about the market, I still believe you should allow your teenager to invest.
Viewer Discretion: I am not a financial advisor and any advice taken below is for educational purposes only. Some of the links below are affiliate, meaning I may profit of off them with them with no extra expense to the customer.
Cons
Teenagers often think many things to be too good to be true. Their incompetence is one of the worst things about letting them invest. Often they can hear about people getting huge returns and make awful decisions to try and match these returns.
The idiotic and pre-mature moves your perfect little angles are very prone to making can be dangerous while investing. Investing is not fake money, and if you want to allow your teenager to invest you need to make sure that they know this.
For these reasons, I don’t think I would allow my teenager to invest using apps like Webull or Robinhood. Even though these apps sound amazing, for teenagers they could be detrimental. Anyone who signs up for one of these apps is advertised to get four free stocks, which is true.
However, I don’t think the four stocks you get for free can make up for teenagers making horrendous mistakes. Currently, as I’m typing, the stock market is having one of its best years ever. Right now you can randomly throw money into the market and almost guarantee that you will still manage to come out with profit.
But the current environment of the stock market can never last forever. Soon, the stock market will go back to its usual self and leave your teenager clueless. No matter how many Tik Toks they watch, they won’t know professional knowledge to save them from losing money.
Pros
With that being said, it can be true that the best thing about investing is time. If your teenager invests one-hundred dollars at fifteen, at twenty-five they should have double that. Now imagine if you left that money in for fifty years.
So, the best thing for a teenager would be to invest, but not be able to trade stocks. An app like that would almost guarantee them more money in the long run. Luckily, there is an app with exactly those features.
I would recommend that all people use the investing app Acorns to invest. The app is especially useful for teenagers with no real knowledge of investing. Basically Acorns is an app that you pay a fee for and they invest your money for you.
The most famous and notable feature of Acorns is called its roundup feature. The round-up feature allows you to invest spare change leftover after a purchase. The goal is that these small amounts of money will eventually add up and make a significant difference in your life.
The account will be invested into the stock market, and therefore will be liable to go up and down. With that beings said, so far I have only had positive results. I have actually written an entire review about Acorns and its features here. I would advise you to give the article a read before you jump into Acorns. You can decide whether or not the app would be good for your teenager.
Would I allow my kids to invest?
With all of this being said, my kids are still very young. So, if they get older and curious I will let them invest with certain boundaries. I would make sure that they were not the ones investing in the stocks but instead making sure that professionals were doing it for them.
I would also make sure my children understood the risk of investing. The real world is not a Tik Tok scam that says money can only go up. In the real world we have boundaries. The more you invest the more money you make. The less risk the less reward.