Tuesday, February 10, 1998
It's Tough to Raise
a Fool
by Mark Stolz
([email protected])
You know, it's tough being a Fool in today's environment. But it's even tougher to raise Fools today. I've been blessed in my life with 3 beautiful daughters, ages 20, 16, and 4. That's no misprint. My two older daughters came along at a time in my life when I was trying to eke out a living and searching for a career that made sense. I think that, with any amount of luck, my youngest girl, Kate, will miss out on that strain. Now that I'm a born-again Fool, she stands a much better chance in her young life to inherit that trait than the older ones do. Kate already has a head-start with a gift of Texaco stock from her retired grandad, cashed in savings bonds that resulted in her being a Compaq owner, and a dad that finally bought into dollar-cost averaging.
But with the two older ones, I've had to take a different approach. I've introduced them to the world of Drips, which I hope will be their first step of a long sojourn down the road to fiscal independence. Last year, following the words from the Fool's own Drip column, I started Drips for the older girls with proceeds from savings bonds that I had purchased through payroll deduction at work.
It wasn't easy trying to convince money-spending, credit card wielding, shop-a-holics to think further ahead than their belly buttons stuck out. Talk about dividends, value stocks, and holding for years was definitely a different tune. But when the talk turned to retiring to a portfolio that had as many zeroes as they had only seen in their worst algebra nightmare, heads started nodding.
My oldest daughter wasn't a tough sell, but the 16 yr. old has always been a spend-first, think-later type. I knew success had been attained the other day when I saw her looking through the stock page of our local paper, straining to see what Chevron had done that day. I've already invested their own voluntary moneys in new shares. Does this mean that it will last forever, or even until that new car or first house beckons? Heck, I'd be ecstatic if they wait that long. But the point is, and shall always be, at least they've started. And the quicker they get going, the sooner I can stop. Aaaaaahhhhhhh!
Have
a similar tale?
Talk about it in the Fribble Message Folder!
[Did you know that you can pen a Fribble, yourself? We welcome submissions from readers. Just click here and read "What's a Fribble?".]