For many years, I’ve been the aunt that gives investment gifts to my niece and nephews.
The idea isn’t to give money in the form of cash. It’s to add lasting value by sharing time and the learning process of investing.
Over the years, these investment gifts can become the foundation of a lifelong financial education.
And yes, they can even create a little bit of wealth for your family members as well.
So today, I want to share some of my favorite investment gift ideas. Perhaps they’ll serve as inspiration.
1) Gold or Silver Coins
As longtime readers know, I give silver dollar coins to my niece and nephews as birthday and holiday gifts.
I’ve been doing this since they were one year old. Over time, our related conversations and interactions have deepened.
So, every year, I buy a particularly interesting silver dollar coin for each of them.
When they were much younger, I’d give them to my siblings for safekeeping. But as the kids got older, it became a direct gift that has evolved over the years.
For instance, my niece decorated her own piggy bank to house these silver coins. My nephew used to put them in various Lego structures he built, but now, he keeps them in his sock drawer.
The point is, as they’ve gotten older, the coins represent more than a gift or their intrinsic value.
For example, my niece and nephews were blown away when I explained that a $1 silver coin is worth more than $1.
Indeed, an American Silver Eagle coin contains one troy ounce of fine silver. It is the official bullion coin of the United States. Right now, it retails for about $80 on the U.S. Mint website .
Coins offer a good way to talk about history, too.
A Thomas Jefferson coin invites a discussion about the Declaration of Independence, while a George Washington coin can start a conversation about the American Revolution.
I choose coins that I can buy directly from the U.S. Mint. The Mint has catalogs of coins and provides accreditation certificates for them.
Coins arrive in lovely blue boxes. You can check them out for yourself on the U.S. Mint website.
2) Bitcoin
When one of my nephews turned 18, he and I had a sit-down.
He’s a very responsible young man who worked part-time jobs through high school, just like I did back in the day. (I tutored math for members of the football team.)
He shared a bank account with his mom, but he would ask her to put money in it on his behalf since he was 13.
Recently, I talked him through opening a Block (previously Square) account on his phone. (He already had a Venmo account by that time.)
Now, him being a teen, he was spending most of his time on his phone anyway. But I wanted to get him comfortable using a financial app for tiny investments without taking too much risk.
So, we sat down together as he created a Block account. And we talked about the pros and cons of Bitcoin (he asked!), as I’ve discussed with you here in these pages.
I transferred a small dollar amount of Bitcoin from my Block account to his. That was part of his gift. The other part was the time we spent together opening this account and using it to accept those funds.
Now, this is not necessarily to make him a Bitcoin advocate. The point was to establish a place where he could get used to observing the value of his Bitcoin, whether it goes up or down.
We talked about not investing more money than you can afford to lose or might need right away for any purpose.
I left it to him to decide whether to add to his Bitcoin positions or not in very small amounts, and to call or text me if he ever has any questions.
It’s easy to set up a Block Cash App account to buy and sell Bitcoin, transfer money to other Cash App contacts, or even buy stock.
Which gets me to our final gift idea…
3) Fractional Shares
The same nephew and I had a conversation about the stock market just before he began college.
It surprised me how many high schoolers talk about the stock market.
My nephew told me that one of his friends was concerned about the market volatility and his investments. I told my nephew that the best thing to do during market choppiness is to hold onto stock positions.
Of course, there are some exceptions.
One exception is if something has changed with the company at a fundamental level… And that makes the company’s prospects different than what you first expected.
Then, your money might be better spent elsewhere.
We talked about how you should have patience in terms of how you invest. And that you should only make investments that you understand, can gather knowledge on, or have a personal connection to.
We also discussed buying a fractional share for a certain amount of dollars of a stock that he was interested in, and we talked about that stock.
He’s an athlete, so he decided to buy a fractional share of Nike. Then, he added to it regularly from the money he made working while in school. He started “legging in” with $5 a week.
Learn by Experience
The best way to learn about financial security is to start by investing a small amount and then observe what happens.
These are not lessons taught in our schools.
But the gift of this sort of financial education can provide real-life dividends in terms of financial wisdom for decades to come.
Regards,
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Nomi Prins
Editor, Inside Wall Street with Nomi Prins