Meet the four-year-old investor
Meet Mila. She’s four years-old, loves Chipmunks Playland and has an investment portfolio.
At her age, it is a bit of a stretch to expect Mila to understand exactly what a growth investor is or how well her portfolio is doing but, for the Morgan family, it’s more about normalising money and how it works.
Last year mum Peti Morgan and her husband Tane made Mila an account on the investing platform Sharesies, following their own jump into financial education.
‘‘With her it’s less about what you do with your money and more about how you talk about it,’’ Morgan said.
That might mean when they’re out at the shops and Mila sees something she wants, Morgan doesn’t want to brush her off by saying ‘‘we can’t afford that’’.
‘‘I’ll go ‘all right, so how much is it?’ Oh so that’s $5, let’s have a look at the bank account’.’’
She said it’s about letting Mila see for herself how money works, especially in a world where people are going cashless more and more.
Morgan pointed to how different generations have dealt with money – saving or storing it away – and said Mila was learning money in a new way, through investment.
‘‘She won’t understand yet different funds and things, but it’s just having the exposure, knowing that investing money and putting it in different funds is normal.’’
Only a few years ago, neither Morgan nor Tane had any idea how investing worked. On top of that, financial education had been pretty slim.
‘‘I didn’t have any education on finances apart from economics class, which is not at all about how to manage your finances,’’ Morgan said.
Even once she was grown up, she didn’t pay much attention to money. It would just go into a bank account, her bank book would get stamped and that was that.
‘‘I didn’t really think about it. I’ve always had quite a high-paying job and I haven’t really had the constraints that help you figure out ‘what are you going to do with your money?’ But all that happened when we had Mila.’’
When Morgan was pregnant, she was made redundant. Their household income was suddenly halved, but the pair was still spending like nothing had happened.
‘‘It started kind of a snowball of financial difficulties, which led us to having a lot of consumer debt. We just racked up debt on cards.’’
To make things worse, postnatal depression meant she wasn’t able to go back to work.
‘‘That was the catalyst for my husband and I figuring out ‘you know what, we could actually do a whole lot better with our
‘‘With her it’s less about what you do with your money and more about how you talk about it.’’ Peti Morgan
finances’,’’ she said.
‘‘I thought ‘Oh gosh, now I’m a mum, I don’t want to be modelling this for my child’.’’
The Morgans started educating themselves more on finance – first by working on their debt and then looking at how money could work for them.
Morgan started her own financial blog, The Leveraged Mama, aimed at mothers, and how they could create income streams that worked better than a traditional nine-to-five job.
That’s when Morgan and Tane started looking into investing, venturing into it through the Sharesies platform.
Morgan said they would normally put in $50 on Christmas or Mila’s birthday and would throw in spare cash when they had it. Every now and then, they’d sit down together and have a look at it with her.
Money could be intimidating, Morgan said, but she wanted her daughter to learn about it a different way.
‘‘Money is not a bad thing,’’ she said, ‘‘Money is there to be made.’’