Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide For Kids: A Book Review

With the new school year upon us, kids might be having a hard time convincing themselves that reading books like Great Expectations and Julius Caesar might actually teach them something they can use.

How about reading something that will absolutely, undoubtedly help them in life instead?

More than ever before, it’s apparent that kids should learn the basics of finance. Nearly every day, the national debt is making headlines, not to mention on a more personal level, student debt and credit card debt which can impact every aspect of a person’s life.

Yet schools usually don’t teach kids about personal finance.

Fortunately, there’s a book that can get kids on the road to financial independence and knowledge. The book is Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide For Kids written by Gail Karlitz and created by Debbie Honig and it discusses the fundamentals of finance in an easy to understand way geared toward kids.

It’s a fantastic book, especially for beginners to the investing and economics world. Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide For Kids is, what I believe, an extremely vital book, giving readers a great erudition to the finance world, with tips and tricks on how to financially succeed well and invest properly. 

This book includes information about stocks (and what can cause changes in the prices of stocks), bonds, savings accounts, and mutual funds, and lots more! It teaches readers how to read the financial news, and includes examples about how these affect real-life scenarios. I also really enjoyed the bonus fact sidebars, and got a kick out of taking the investment personality quiz which determined how risky you are.

The book delves into the history of the stock market, including the Great Depression and the Great Recession of 2008, and discusses bull and bear markets, as well as what causes them.

Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide For Kids also describes illegal activities that can trick investors out of their hard-earned life savings, so that readers won’t end up falling for one of these schemes. These include pump and dumps, insider trading, and Ponzi schemes. Even better, readers get tips on how to protect themselves from stock hoaxes.

I think growing money is an essential read, and I highly recommend it for kids from nine and up.

Nothing against Great Expectations or Julius Caesar, but I can almost guarantee that kids will get a lot more use out of this book.