Why Wealth Literacy and Not Financial Literacy Should be Essential Education for Young Adults

According to a recent study conducted by Charles Schwab, today’s teenagers in the United States have huge expectations about the type of wealth that they will build as young adults. Of the 1,000 teenagers that participated in the survey, boys on average expected to be earning $173,000 a year while girls expected to be earning $114,200 annually. The reality is, however, that only 5% of all wage-earning adults in the U.S. earn six figure salaries.

The Schwab survey further discovered that nearly two-thirds of American teens aged 13-18 years-old believe that they were knowledgeable about money management, including budgeting, saving and investing. However, despite this typical braggadocio that accompanies teenagers, barely a third of them admitted to knowing how to budget money (41 percent), how to pay bills (34 percent), and how credit card interest and fees work (26 percent). Here is where this survey is lacking and where a crucial gap in understanding must be bridged. Despite most teens lacking this knowledge, this is not the knowledge they need to build wealth. It is the knowledge they need to perhaps assume a baseline of fiscal responsibility as young adults, but hardly the knowledge that will help them assert their wealth-building muscles. As I stated in my last blog, teenagers need to learn the below subjects to acquire the critical gap in knowledge that will convert them from fiscally responsible young adults to adults capable of building wealth.

Many adults assume that their children will have zero interest in learning about how to build wealth, but the Schwab studies reveal otherwise. According to the Schwab survey, “nearly 9 in 10 say they want to learn how to make their money grow (89 percent). Two-thirds (65 percent) believe learning about money management is ‘interesting,’ and 60 percent say that learning about money management is one of their top priorities.” These stats are encouraging but the accessibility to the type of education that will truly benefit young adults is still highly guarded and certainly unavailable through typical channels of traditional education.

I strongly believe that young adults will never acquire the proper education to learn the critical knowledge they need to build wealth through traditional education or certainly not through educational programs sponsored by investment firms. Why?

If investment firms truly provided the type of education that young adults needed to independently build wealth then it would render their own services obsolete and unnecessary. No firm would ever willfully engage in such self-defeating behavior. This would be analogous to a tobacco firm sponsoring educational programs about the deleterious effects of smoking including lung cancer. I imagine that such firm-sponsored educational programs carefully design the programs to spark an interest in young adults about investing while still leaving them dependent upon them to invest their money in the future. It’s the perfect set-up for investment firms. Shaping young minds to give them their future earnings. However, it is most definitely NOT what will help young adults build wealth.

So wherever you seek information for not only your children but for yourself, ensure that the program you seek does not just teach you basic fiscal responsibility skills that still leave you dependent upon someone else to manage your money, but ensure that such a program is comprehensive enough to teach your children how to manage their money themselves as well. Ensuring that your children (or perhaps even you) seek knowledge regarding wealth literacy will, in the end, be exponentially more important than ensuring that your children become financially literate.

This article may be freely reprinted on another website as long as it is not modified, changed, or altered in any way and as long as the below author byline is included along with the active hyperlink exactly as is.

J.S. Kim is the Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU™. He has over thirteen years of experience in finance and financial services, and has earned a BA in Neurobiology from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master in Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MBA with a concentration in finance from the McCombs Business School, University of Texas at Austin. He is the inventor of the revolutionary MoneyPing™ investment strategies, a novel approach to learn advanced wealth planning techniques, and how to build wealth, not just dreams.

To learn more about how to dramatically decrease investment risk and intelligently increase the probabilities of 25% or higher annual returns, click the following link Advanced Wealth Planning Techniques and Learn How to Invest

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The Value Investing Approach - What Is Value Investing All About?

One investment strategy is value investing. Individuals who adopt this style of investment are called value investors. Value investors usually purchase companies whose share price could be under appreciated for some reason.

Value investors search the marker for the undervalued companies. The reason a company is thought to be undervalued is because value investors believe that the stock market overreacts to good and bad news announced by companies in the company’s monthly, quarterly or annual reports. This means that in the short run share prices fluctuations have more volatility than that of the average long run price of the shares in a company. The short term swings in the price of shares leaves value investors with a good opportunity to make a quick buck.

The majority of value investors seek out stocks with lower prices than the average price to book. However the value of stocks is no longer as easy to estimate as it once was. The book value of certain goods is well defined however since the advent of fast paced technological advancement and the constant changing of technological products the value of most goods is no longer so easy to predict.

The potential in value investing was first recognised by Benjamin Graham who was a lecturer from Columbia University. What Graham propagated was a cautionary approach to investing. What this means is, purchasing stocks that are relatively safe in that they don’t fluctuate greatly from their book value. This protects value investors from any potential stock market shocks in the future be they good or bad.

Value investing is the a good relatively safe way for an experienced investor to make safe earnings on the stock market while minimizing risk. The fluctuations of the stock market are avoided as opposed to day traders who like the ride the waves of the stock market. Day trading is a very risky form of investment and not for the faint hearted investors.

The stock market has just as many losers as winners. For every stock sold on the market by a seller there is a buyer out there who is purchasing it. Only one of you, either the buyer or seller can be right. One of you is making a profit the other one is making a loss.

In summary - in order to be a good value investor you must have a deep understanding of the how the market works and a keen eye for how efficient the market is at any given point of time.

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