South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Teaching financial literacy at an early age
New workbook by Latina mother and daughter is geared toward children
DALLAS — Elizabeth Ruiz can recall hearing her mother Linda Garcia, 40, yelling with excitement when the stock markets shot up.
At the time, Ruiz was mulling topics for her first Grow With Color workbook. The 25-year-old founded the Dallas-based children’s brand to provide low-cost educational materials rooted in the Montessori philosophy.
“Maria Montessori started her first school in a low-income neighborhood,” Ruiz said. “And I don’t think that it should be limited to only people who can afford it. It should be for everybody.”
She realized her five years of experience as a Montessori teacher combined with her mother’s knowledge of the stock market could be blended together to create “My Stock Market Workbook,” which teaches children about investing and building generationalwealth.
The 82-page workbook gives children a general understanding about investing and finance while providing them with a variety of activities that review numbers and the alphabet. It is available on Amazon.
Garcia said her interest in the stock market was sparked in late 2012, when she first began investing. In the first year, she invested
$200 a month and slowly built it to $400 a month in the following year. She invested mostly in Netflix stock, and her total initial investment was about
$7,000.
Today, that investment is worth over $400,000. She said it taught her that a dollar isn’t just a dollar
because it has the potential to grow.
“I really saw this as an urgent message to get out into our communities, most especially communities of color, where we are taught that the stock market is really risky,” Garcia said.
Garcia hadworked for 17 years as amarketing executive in California at companies likeLionsgate andNetflix for TV and film programming catering to U.S. Hispanics. Her daughter graduated from the University of North Texas, where she studied criminal justice, and is working on her master’s degree at Sam Houston State University in digital forensics.
My StockMarketWorkbook is set up in the same way that Ruiz would introduce a child to a classroom. The beginning has coloring pages that transition into tracing, allowing a child to work on penmanship skills. From there, the book goes into the alphabet, and finishes with a “brain break” with more coloring pages.
“Thewords that I picked in the illustrations are something that the child might not be able to define at such a young age, but the child starts to visualize,”
Ruiz said. “They’ll remember what a high yield savings account is — I colored that. When they get older and begin to understand, it’s not something that’s brand new to them.”
She said she created the book for children as young as 2.
“There’s a really tender age to start learning, and our relationship with money personally affects our household,” Garcia said.
While Latinos are the second-largest and fastestgrowing population in the United States, only 28% of Hispanic households own stock compared to nonHispanic white households, where 68% own stock, according to Pew Research Center.
“It’s our dream to see children at a young age have shares in whatever interests them, whether it’s Disney or Target,” Garcia said “And hopefully when they’re 18 years old, they get to see the longevity, the importance of investing long-term and buying and holding that investment (so) they don’t have to worry about student loans. Ormaybe they already have their down payment for their first home.”