Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide for Kids Book Review

When it comes to making money grow and work for you, learning about investing is one of the keys to determining the options available. Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide for Kids by Gail Karlitz is a tool parents can use to help explain investing to their children and provide a strong foundation in the keys to successful investing while children are young.

The book discusses a few major issues relating to money with a primary focus on investing and the stock market. The author uses small-scale, easy to understand examples that are great when teaching children and adults alike the keys to investing and making the most of earned income.

The book is primarily about investing and growing money through different investment options. Though it focuses on investment, the book also discusses topics like inflation and savings.

The book starts with a discussion about inflation, which is a key component that children and adults need to understand when planning out investment strategies. Since this topic is rarely discussed in investing books, it is a refreshing start that helps children grasp the concepts of money on a small and easy to understand scale. Parents can use this topic as a way to discuss inflation in necessary expenses like food and how the market can sometimes have prices going up while the earned income remains the same. This helps teach the importance of having some money set aside in savings.

The topic about savings is also an important part of the book that helps parents start the topic and gives children an overview of methods they can use when working toward saving money. Parents can explain their saving methods, how to spend and still save money and methods of saving that even children can use.

Though savings and inflation is discussed, the primary focus of the book is investing. The investment discussion breaks down information into easy to understand portions, sometimes using different working terms rather than the technical terms to avoid confusion. Everything from buying and selling stocks to dividends and equity are provided in easy to read words and phrases that children can understand and apply to their savings or investment accounts. When it comes to investment lessons, parents can discuss safe investments and lowering risks through investing in bonds, funds and stocks to diversify the portfolio.

Pros: The main advantage, or pro, of the book is the clear and concise language and the easy to understand explanations of the terms and concepts. Children and adults can learn concepts and details from the book without difficulty.

Cons: While the book is a great resource to learn investing keys, it has limited information about mutual funds and it does not discuss taxes from investments. This might require parents to teach about filing taxes and the importance of paying taxes when making money through investments on their own.