Starting a business? Check out this awesome, all-things-startup website: http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/
Parent of a budding tycoon? (Can never start too young you know.) Plant the startup seed early with this book for ‘kidpreneurs’ 6-12 years old and you never know what can grow:
Biz Kid$ is really honored to receive the Parent’s Choice Gold Award for Television.
The Parents’ Choice Gold Awards are given to those books, toys, games, videos, software, magazines, audio recordings, and television programs that are judged as the highest quality, most appealing products in their genre. Criteria for judgments include the highest production standards, universal human values and a unique, individual quality that pushes the product a notch above others.
The episode submitted was 507 – What’s In The Books, which explains the importance of bookkeeping and how to keep track of your dough.
Do you still pay for your teen’s cellphone bill? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal says “more than 2 in 5 parents of 18-to-35 year old adult children still pay for their kids’ cellphone service.”
78% of teens now have a cell phone and almost half of them own smartphones according to Pew Research. The average age for teens to receive their own cell phone is between 12 and 13, based on a statistic from Top Ten Reviews .
Clearly cell phones play an important role in the lives of teens, yet do they really understand that these tiny devices cost money…..potentially a lot of money?
Texting charges, roaming charges, airtime charges, and access charges can all add up……not to mention the taxes.
Cell phone bills can be really confusing — even if you’re not paying for your teens’s cell phone, take the time to sit down with them each month and go through the bill line by line. Make them understand what those 50 texts a day to their friend actually cost.
And as soon as your teen gets a job they can start paying their own way – you’ll be surprised how much their cellphone bill drops once they’re responsible for it! If you’re trying to teach your teen financial responsibility you can avoid the static at the other end of the line, by simply focusing on something they can truly relate to… their phone.
> Post By Erika Vujnovich: Erika is a business journalist with more than 15 years of experience in the industry. Her key focus is educating parents on how to teach their children about basic financial topics. A former writer/producer at CNNfn, CNBC and Bloomberg, member of the NY Financial Writers’ association, and recipient of the TJFR 30 under 30 financial journalism award. You can find her on Twitter @erikavujnovich.
When starting a business it’s important to follow your passion — even if you’re just 12 years old. Isabella, one of the founders of Creative Doodle Kids, says she tried several business ideas but nothing seemed to stick. Then she realized that she should base her business on something she loved doing, which was art. The next day a business was born! Creative Doodle Kids is a website which sells all kinds of art – paintings, sculptures, greeting cards, and more. 5% of profits are donated to the World Wildlife Fund too.
If you need a unique gift for someone check out Creative Doodle Kids!
DoSomething.org has a great way to win some moula for college. What’s the craziest thing you did to save your greenbacks? Submit your story about your money-saving scheme and you will be entered to win a $4,000 scholarship (so you don’t have to do such crazy stuff to pay for school).
It’s all right here: http://www.dosomething.org/crazy/about
Investors are feeling giddy and that enthusiasm recently pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average to new heights. When your teen starts following the stock market, he or she will hear about indexes including the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq Composite.
So what’s an index?
In the simplest terms, an index is a basket of stocks which represents a certain sector of the market. These stocks are basically speaking for a much larger group. For example, want to gauge how retailers are doing? Track a retail index which consists of a certain number of stocks, representing the retail industry as a whole. Other popular indexes include the U.S. Travel and Leisure Index, Transportation as well as Pharmaceutical. The list goes on…..
When an index rises or falls, you’ll hear market watchers say things like “retailers saw some nice gains today,” or “airline stocks had a rough ride.”
When we talk about the Dow, we are referring to stocks which make up the Dow Jones industrial Average. The index was created in 1896 and currently consists of stocks from 30 major U.S. companies. Movement in these stocks give investors an idea of how the overall market is faring. Some companies in the Dow include Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobil, The Home Depot and McDonald’s.
Two other well-known indexes are the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. The S&P 500 (or Standard & Poor’s 500), is made up of 500 companies which trade in the U.S. stock market. Many investors follow the S&P 500 since it gives a broader overview of the market. They’ll also follow Nasdaq, which represents many well-known technology companies, to gauge how tech stocks did on a particular day.
If your teen is ready for investing have them focus on an area they are familiar with and research if there is an index which follows that particular industry.
Discuss these basics with your teen and you may very well get a text which reads “OMG! Did U C the DOW today? CRZ! TTYL!
> Post provided by @ErikaVujnovich
89-year old Grandma’s startup on Kickstarter:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/20/smallbusiness/grandma-kickstarter-startup/index.html
Want to start a business, but have no capital? It won’t matter when the JOBS Act kicks in — new rules will help entrepreneurs sell equity through crowd funding:
http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/blog/startup-news/4-things-young-entrepreneurs-need-to-know-about-the-jobs-act/
It’s not the big kids who always win on the field and the same holds true for the plays investors make in the stock market.
While market cap is a measure of how much a company is worth, it is not a measure of how well the stock will perform. Sometimes the small guys produce greater returns for investors.
When explaining a company’s size, you’ll hear the term market capitalization or market cap. It’s basically how much money the company is worth. This is determined by multiplying the stock price by how many shares (or individual pieces of the company) are available. When building a portfolio, investors often look to different size companies to help diversify their holdings. They will often invest in not only what we call large-cap stocks, but also mid-cap and small-cap; based on the size of the market cap.
To put things in perspective, according to Investopedia.com, large cap companies are those with market caps of $10 billion plus, mid cap are $2 billion – $10 billion and small cap are those with less than $2 billion.
If your teen is ready to take on the world of investing, he or she should explore companies they are most familiar with. Teens are probably among the pickiest consumers. They know what’s in and what’s out. Let them use that to their advantage in determining where they should put their money. In fact, famed Wall Street tycoon, Warren Buffett, tells investors to simply buy what they know. (On a side note, Buffett made his first investment at age eleven — so in other words, it’s never too early to start!)
When encouraging your child to invest, definitely teach them to research names they know. However, explain that while they may be tempted to immediately turn to some of the biggies on Wall Street, such as the Apples and Googles of the world, they shouldn’t be afraid to look into smaller companies they admire.
If they see something special in a brand, they may very well be onto something which could turn out to be a solid investment.
> Post provided by @ErikaVujnovich
Additional Resource: cfd trader è una truffa
Check out Noah’s Dream Catcher Network, built by a budding 12-year old philanthropist. Noah’s goal is to help people help each other. Last year he even raised over $10,000 to prevent his Grandma’s home from being foreclosed. Now that boy deserves some cookies!
Explaining Patents to Kids:
Sometimes parents underestimate their kids’ ideas. But you never know if they could be the next Alexander Graham Bell, Ben Franklin, or……… Frank Epperson!
Who is Frank Epperson? He is an 11-year old boy who invented the ice pop back in 1905. And, did you know the earmuff was created by a 15-year old back in 1877?
These inventors are kids, just like ours!
As parents, it’s important to support kids’ imagination because that cool idea might just have some potential. But if the invention has commercial potential then it will be essential to get a patent on it. How do you explain a patent to a kid?
When an individual or company develops a new product they will stake a claim on their unique idea, so no one else is able to steal it. They protect the idea by getting a patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office. These are licenses awarded by the government giving the owner exclusivity over something he/she invented for a certain amount of time.
To explain the concept of patents to kids, try focusing on products they know about. The next time they reach for their favorite electronic device explain how someone came up with the idea for it, and that it likely has a patent on the technology.
Even food companies need to have patents — Kraft and Kellogg are currently battling it out over snack superiority. These companies take their snack making ability so seriously that they are actually fighting over the packaging their cookies come in. Kraft is suing Kellogg arguing it improperly uses one of its patents to keep its Keebler cookies fresh.
From cookies to ice pops, there are plenty of resources out there for budding inventors.
Next time your teen exclaims, “Hey look what I just built,” take a moment to listen.
> Post provided by @ErikaVujnovich
The co-founder of OrigAudio lets viewers in on the top business lessons he’s learned along with key tips on how to stand out amid stiff competition. Check out his video
