Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest
roberdam.comAuthor understands child psychology.
You can't motivate kids by filling their heads with theory. Instead, make the outcomes of their actions visible to them - then they -motivate themselves- to learn how to improve those outcomes. Add in some friendly peer-competition and you're golden!
How does the withdraw work? You manually reset the date to today and the amount to what it was last time you saw it minus the withdrawal?
Then orchestrate an artificial bubble and crash
“The first national bank of dad” is a book that suggests a similar approach and I believe it also advocates a 15% interest rate.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...
And on top of that there's huuuuuuuuge variance over time. You have to scale in and out of the market over a very long time to actually get the ~7%. Any one time investment is just a straight up gamble. It's only in aggregate over a long time that you get something somewhat reliable. But then the numbers aren't that impressive. I understand why people are so fond of buying bigger or second houses instead. It's a shame because it drives up the price of housing making it less available for our young. We're basically saving for our future by robbing the future of our young. It's pretty dark to be honest.
But without leverage, long run return of residential real estate is like 3% after costs, which is less than equities but above bonds.
At least that’s what I tell myself as I go to sleep in my apartment, a non-homeowner watching people accumulate serious paper gains in their houses ;(
Source: a paper called the real return on everything.
The paper "the real return on everything" notably cuts off in 2010 and is talking about global averages, if you narrow it down to specific countries we can see stark differences. In the USA and UK you get 8.4% and 7.2% returns on equity, but only 6.03% and 5.36% returns on housing, a stark difference. Adding in mortage leverage adds on about a percent or so of return, thus still not bringing housing in-line with equities.
If we narrow our window to post 1980, we see in the UK returns of 9.34, 6.81 and 6.67 % for equity, housing and bonds. If we look at post 2010 in the uk, house prices have only stayed the same or decreased in real terms since then in the uk for instance, whilst equities have soared.
They also in the paper assume bond yields are roughly the same as mortage interest rates, which maybe was true for their data period, but hasn't been true since 2010 (https://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/uploads/monthly_2022...)
Finally you can diversify equities globally, you cannot diversify your housing globally (if using leverage in a mortage).
While the housing market as a whole may go up, the likelihood that any individual house will go up probably varies more.
How do you get that much leverage from a brokerage to invest in equities? In the US we have something called Reg T, which basically says brokerages can only lend at 2:1 against securities in most cases.
Even most leveraged ETFs will generally stop at 3X.
Since we have stamp duty (a tax on share purchases), it is massively advantageous to use CFD's especially if you can find a provider who doesn't offer leverage, so your downside stays low. In addition since it is legally classed as gambling, earnings are not taxed which offers a nice tax advantage over stocks or options if you're investing more than £20k a year (the max you can invest tax-free a year in the UK in an ISA).
Effective interest rate is something like 7-10%
> As my eldest son’s birthday was approaching, we suggested that instead of asking for physical gifts, he ask for their equivalent in money. That way, he gathered a decent amount of capital for his first investment adventure.
Yes, why would you want a toy or a book? Why waste time having fun or learning? You could instead watch a number go up slowly while you do nothing. Fun for the whole family, seconds at a time!
> Each day, as they watch their small fund grow, they grasp the magic of compound interest — and that, more than any gift, is a lesson I hope will stay with them for life.
This feels like raising finance dude bros and gambling addicts. There is no “magic” to compound interest, no one should have “watch money accumulate” as a life goal.
That’s not what the article says. I explicitly quoted the relevant part. It’s not “a portion of their money”, this is not money they had lying around in an envelope that grandma gave them. This father is incentivising the kids to not get what they want for their birthday and instead ask for money with which they’ll do nothing but unrealistically watch grow for a period of time. That’s not a good core memory, no one looks fondly on “that birthday I had as a kid where I got nothing but a number on an app stated growing at a snail pace”.
> doesn't suddenly make investing bad.
That’s not the argument. Nowhere in my comment does it say investing is bad.
> This is such a wild take.
Any take is wild when you blatantly misrepresent it. Don’t straw man.
Also, learning to use Excel by playing fantasy stocks during the dot-com bubble, and having a Lycos homepage “Portfolio” widget just like my mom did is a fond memory for me, and zero people on Earth would call me a finance bro today.
> we suggested that instead of asking for physical gifts, he ask for their equivalent in money.
For their equivalent. In other words, the kid has to decide something they want then deliberately choose to not get it so they can “invest” it and see line go up.
It would’ve been different if this had instead been a case of “grandma just gave you an envelope with cash; if you don’t have plans for it, how about investing?”. Which works on many levels, they could’ve also spent some portion of the money on something they wanted then invested the surplus, or a myriad other options.
This seems hyperbolic. Given that money doubles in roughly 10 years at a 10% rate of return, if kiddos are 10 years old they get two doublings by 30. To be a millionaire by 30 requires a present value investment of $250k per child.
yeah definitely no learning happening here
> You could instead watch a number go up slowly while you do nothing.
and then...spend it on something nice?
> This feels like raising finance dude bros and gambling addicts.
This is a super reactive take speaking from no experience whatsoever. My own parents did something like this for us when we were in elementary/middle school and it taught me restraint in spending, not the opposite.
You have no idea what my experience is, please don’t assume.
> My own parents did something like this for us when we were in elementary/middle school and it taught me restraint in spending, not the opposite.
I’m glad it worked out for you. Truly. But don’t assume your experience is universal, because I unfortunately know for a fact it’s not. Also, the argument isn’t that it causes unrestrained spending, that’s not what financial dude bros are about. Excessive restraint in spending can also lead to unhappiness and an unhealthy attachment to money.
Are they actually investing anything? If so, wouldn’t the app for the brokerage do this with real numbers?
Do you deduct short term and long term capital gains taxes?
- react app - pwa manifest - tailwind css
This is not at all a "plain html" file.
My firewall shows blocked connections to cdn.tailwindcss.com and unpkg.com
Any website you visit could have been compromised and serving malicious content. Upon first visit to a website, I block all connections to domains not in the address bar, then go back in and add rules to allow connections as needed. It doesn't address malicious activity by the site directly, like a server compromise, but does limit non-addressed connections, including ones to local addresses.
For example, a compromise of .google.com which leveraged assets/code from .googleusercontent.com wouldn't initially be able to run, unless I added a rule to allow the connection. Likewise, a compromise of *.discord.com that made a connection to localhost:8983, then tried to send that data to someserver.ru would get blocked and logged. Where this can't protect me is if the server sends the mined data back to itself, then forwards that data on using its own connection.
Ad networks sell to anyone. Malicious content can be injected almost anywhere. Its happened before; it'll happen again. This web browsing hygiene has protected me enough times for me to make it my standard practice.
The AI just picked react because that’s the most common framework.
I mean nothing wrong with that, I needed a silly calculator thingimabob too yesterday (for some CRC checks on a piece of text) and Claude quickly cooked something up for me.
But I'm not writing blog posts about it, releasing the tool in the wild, and claiming I wrote it. Blegh.
This type of calculator is so common you can even find one on an official US government website.
https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calcula...
EDIT: I wouldn't have expected external dependencies, though.
Or even worse, in the tradition of these unclickable javascript buttons of the late 1990's, just detect when the finger is approaching the "withdraw" button and have the asset crash right before they can click!
Author then proceeds to put 15% annual interest rate...
11% may be the safest bond you have access to, but that doesn't make it _safe_ in absolute terms.
Imagine you have a scenario where inflation is 0 in currency A and 10% in currency B. Would you rather have a 2% bond in currency A or a 9% bond in currency B? This is why Euro bonds go negative sometimes, when USD interest rates were very low and the Euro was deflationary relative to the dollar, it could push rates even further lower.
The interesting question would be what their currency, where this 11% is offered, typically loses year-on-year
I used to know an adult who only cared about that number going up, despite making more than a comfortable amount of money. Live with parents, save on rent/mortgage, number goes up faster. Buy cheapest food, take leftovers from work-catered lunches, number goes up faster. Scam your way into being hired for a position you are severely underqualified for, get terminated after three months, keep the salary and sign-on bonus, number goes up. Invest pretty much everything (because there are almost no expenses), compound interest.
And to be fair, investing does not apply to most people either.
Why doesn't investing apply to most people?
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck.
Can we stop with this myth? Most states require financial literacy courses to graduate. The reason it feels like it isn't happening is because it's boring and most just don't pay attention or absorb the lessons.
What's a state? Pretty sure we don't have those here.
Even if it was true for America (probably not), it certainly isn't true for the entire rest of the world.
Maybe they should be teaching Geography.
It's apparently now 30 states.
But going from "it's not a requirement" to "the class is awful" would kinda be moving goalposts, no?
And for many of us, financial education, if there was any, was probably from boomers going "debt bad! credit bad! get a job and make money!".
Seems pretty clear to me that the comment I was originally replying to was about whether there was a requirement for financial classes in the US, not about the quality of the classes.
So we clearly weren't looking at the same goalposts.
I think it's common everywhere to be honest.
Here in the UK there's never been financial literacy taught at a national scale that I'm aware, there certainly wasn't when I was in school, albeit that was some decades ago now, and from what I've seen of my nephews/nieces it still isn't.
My children are still too young to worry about the minutiae, but we're already trying to teach them about income/outgoings and saving even at their middle single-digit ages.
Investing is something I can't say I'm extremely comfortable with the details of even at my advanced age besides the simple things like "I have a pension" and "I have a LISA".
I definitely think there's room for some self-service tools to aid in teaching these things to our kids from an early age.
Prior to 2020 only 8 states required a standalone financial literacy class. So a good percentage of people from the US on here probably didn't have to.
There were also states that had it integrated with another course but I'd question if they were any good. My state was like that and all we did was a 2 week project where we pretended to trade stocks starting with $1k. Which didn't even include things like dividends, short vs long term capital gains tax, etc...
We weren't taught basic things like budgeting, planning for emergencies, how loans and interest work, how taxes work, how credit scores work and affect you, etc...
I might be wrong, but reading this, I couldn’t help but think: if we’ve reached the point where we’re building apps to get our kids into investing, maybe we’re living through our own “barber moment.”
I'm sure Mr. Rothschild would be fine with this learning tool.
Maybe we should get into what Natalie Rothschild said while being interviewed, about her family's fondness for incest? Or would that be anti-Semtiic as well?
What exactly can you say about the Rothschild bloodline (except for praising them) that isn't considered anti-Semitic? Please do tell!
Criticize individuals all you want, but don't do it by "bloodline", ethnicity, or whether they're a banker or not. Agency lies with the individual.
Sorry but I'm not going to kowtow to your ridiculous logic. It's perfectly fair to lob criticism at bloodlines, and if you had ever opened a history book you would readily understand that.
- the exact opposite of criticizing individuals; you're really just going after the group
- the definition of prejudice
- the foundation of most (all?) giant human catastrophes like the Holocaust, the various communist land reforms, the crusades, and all sorts of horrible events
I'm a conservative, but I have to say this idea of not being prejudiced is really something great that liberalism brought to the table over the past 100-200 years. I'm gobsmacked to see people rejecting this idea.
If I navigate to - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_of_the_Rothschild_fa... - every section of the page mentions the family being involved in banking. Am I stereotyping members of the Rothschild bloodline by saying they're involved in international banking? I don't think so.
I'm equally gobsmacked by people who claim we shouldn't utilize pattern recognition or who want to pretend stereotypes materialize out of thin air.
Reality: Dump everything into Nvidia / S&P 500. Number go up.
There is no such thing as "growth detached from value" lasting forever.
Even George Hotz understands this is the symptom of a larger issue and it is going to end bad: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/24/gambl...
Still, if a 10 year old had started investing 10% in the market in 1920 and stuck through it during the depression, even with no income coming in at the time, they would have done handsomely through the recovery and into old age. In fact, a middle aged person who had been investing until 1929 would have not been fully cleaned out, and that money would have recovered its value by 1943. Margin was what killed fortunes in the day, so the lesson to learn is to avoid margin for your investment portfolio. (Speculation is a different story).
I knew I wanted to save a lot for my future and retirement since I was in high school. I didn’t gain any reasonable ability to do so until much later.
A much better life skill in my opinion would be to teach about budgeting, how to cook economical meals, how to avoid debt traps and lifestyle inflation.
That said, I don't think knowledge of investment gets you very far if your job pays subsistence wages. I worked for a popular fintech focused on personal investment and their narrative was essentially "financial freedom through investment". I think it's important to understand that even the most sophisticated knowledge of investment and personal finance does nothing substantial if you aren't making surplus money to begin with.
With my tinfoil hat on, I feel like that is by design.
277 more comments available on Hacker News