This article kills me. "When I was 14, my parents gave me $10-15(usd)/week and I could make an extra $20 by not watching tv, another $10 for doing the dishes each night for a week, and just generally increasing my hustle. I stole all of my brothers allowance money by doing his jobs so he didn't have to, and thus became way wiser with money than he is! Also, I opened a Roth IRA as a child/teenager because my parents told me investing is smart, and they put the first bit of money in there, and that all compounded through and after the Great Recession so at 28 when the recovery was in full swing I was (relatively) loaded and had net worth of $550k! Why can't everyone just do what I did?"
Like come the fuck on; other people can't do what you did because they didn't have that lucky/educational of a childhood! My parents never mentioned investing growing up because they don't have any investments. Her allowance was $1 a week, and every few months she was getting a "raise"; mine was $1/week indefinitely until I had my first job, at which point it just stopped. When I was like 10 I got that first "job", a paper route that payed 4cents a paper and an extra half cent for each ad I put in it, delivered 3 times a week. My take home (after about 10-12 hours a week for 4 weeks) was like $25-30/month. When I was 14(the age she was hustling her brothers allowance away from him and making $15(usd)/week), I was making about $6(cad)/hr working at Dairy Queen, getting two 3-hour shifts a week and spending the better part of one hour's worth of work on a goddamn ice cream sundae or a blizzard at the end of each shift, because I was a goddamn idiot child who had ice cream in front of them. My weekly take home after working and getting my snack was maybe $20-30, which is about her allowance alone, let alone her "hustle money. I still had to do household chores just like her, but she was "earning" the same just off of the basic stuff expected from being a child. In other words, her parents were probably well enough off that they could afford to give her this allowance, teach her about investments, and foster good financial principles at a young age. During the recession/recovery I sure as shit didn't have investments that were increasing in value; I was trying to keep my university credit card debt from going out of control until my student loans came in for the next semester and I could pay off the previous four months of debt I had accrued, then run up the cards again until summer employment and pay them down, then repeat the cycle.
This whole article literally says "I came from an ok/well off family who had their finances straight, they taught me a bunch of shit and enabled me to put it into practice, and so I came out way ahead of everyone else." Like, yeah, that's the entire fucking point: most people didn't get that financial instruction at a young age, and now we're paying for it 20 years later. The majority of people didn't grow up in an environment where those things were taught, reinforced and enabled!
My parents didn't teach us about investments because they were always struggling with money; my dad worked two jobs to cover expenses so that my mom could also work part time while we were at school, and then raise three kids until my brother was old enough to be left at home without supervision so she could start earning more money too. I learned about the basics of investing and financials from my older brother who had a 5-6 year lead on me, so he figured some shit out before my sister and I did. I was already a couple years into working before I had heard of an RRSP/TFSA (canadian "401k-ish"investment vehicles), and another year or two before I started using them.
The article is clearly confusing the point of "its so easy, anyone can do it!" with "most people are never taught this shit/don't learn about it until way too late and are way behind because of that fact."
www.biggerpockets.com
