OT? Dropping the ladder down

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I’ve mentioned a couple times that LACK of Financial Education is a roadblock (to FI, and RE), and our society does NOT ‘favor’ training every citizen in finances.
My heirs (and anyone else I encounter) all know that I invest in stocks, cause anytime I get the opportunity, I tell them to start investing: LTBH, RIRA, R401k… or IRA, 410k, 403b, and individual brokerage account.
I am obsessed with pushing people to get involved in learning about investing. And, I’ve pushed my heirs all their lives.

My heirs graduated HS, and went about ‘life’.
They are now between 30 and 40yo.
I ‘woke up’ to the fact that ‘I was gonna have to take care of Ralph financial future’ when I was 35 or so, and I figure my heirs might also be ‘waking up’.
I believe that people ‘learn a topic, when that topic becomes important to them’.

So, last year, I reached out to all my heirs. I sent text messages to each, with an attachment for the Options Wheel Strategy.
ONE responded. The others did not respond in any way.

The one, I began to tutor. He’s a blue collar professional, makes decent wage, but is now a single father with 2 kids. He also told me that he’d already been seeing/reading the articles about how much one needs to have saved by age x. He also works with people who talk to him about their ‘investing’. so, he’s ‘woke’. LOLOL.

He JUMPED FEET FIRST into learning financial vocabulary and concepts.
I’ve pushed him on LTBH, Buy the Dip, Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA),
Portfolio management to have most investments in LTBH, solid companies (no debt, Lots of cash, solid leadership, etc).
Value vs Growth stocks.
LTBH wealth building vs Options INCOME right now.
How to evaluate a company. Reading financial statements.
TA vs FA.
Quality investments vs ‘speculation’.
Lots more.
We can now have ‘peer’ level conversations about various stocks, the company, investing, TA, FA, etc.

He has the LTBH concepts down, and is DCAing each month.
I’ve also pushed him to put 10% in Options, specifically the Wheel Strategy.
I also provided seed money to get started. Both in the LTBH and the Options.
I gifted 17.9k in 2024 and again in 2025. 17.9k is under the 18k gift limit, the limit rises to 19k in 2025.
My goal is to get him up to speed on investing concepts and get him actively investing. He fully funded RIRA in 2024 and now in 2025.
He has LTBH investments, both in individual taxable brokerage, RIRA, and in his company provided tax-deferred account.
He’s doing Wheel Strategy Options in his taxable account.

I’m very proud of him. IMO, he has picked up investing concepts quite rapidly. And, is applying them.

He’s also a ‘saver’, and (like me) genetically frugal LBYM. He finds it difficult to just ‘buy’ stuff.
His priority is his two little kids, second is ‘finance’. I approve.

I made it clear (I hope) that there are no strings attached to the ‘gift $’. He’s an adult. This is now his $. BUT, I made clear that MY/ralph’s goal is that he learn to invest, and to do the Wheel Strategy for INCOME.
*[My other ‘want’ is that he ‘pay it forward’ - but, I ain’t mentioned that yet.]

He’s at the same age I was when I ‘woke up’.
Rather than me/ralph dying with a ‘big pile’, I want to jump start him along the path to FIRE.
So, I’m dropping the ladder.

I’m also mulling ‘gifting’ more. 19k/year is the 2025 limit to do so without tax consequences. Anything over that must be declared, and applied to the Lifetime Federal Gift Tax, 13.9M/person, and track it.

{ Any amount beyond that will involve using part of your lifetime federal gift tax exclusion, which is $13.99 million per person in 2025. If you do exceed the annual exclusion amount, you’ll need to file a gift tax return and track the amounts given each year. }

How to gift money to children, family, and loved ones | Fidelity

I would like to get him to the point where a Wheel Strategy would basically double his monthly paycheck.

I can ‘see’ a way to do that, without causing me financial stress.

He, and the other heirs, are indeed my ‘heirs’. I want to get them started today. But, he is the only one who has demonstrated ‘financial woke’, so, I start with him.

:slight_smile: :man_cartwheeling: :slight_smile:
ralph.

Wheel Strategy Explained. SELLING options. Sell an option, either a Cash Secured Put (CSP), or a Covered Call (CC) until assigned. Then do the ‘other’ option. Sell a CSP until forced to buy the stock, then CC until forced to sell, repeat CSP to CC to CSP to CC… wheel it, in a cycle.

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Options wheel strategy?

Way above the heads of someone just getting their financial feet under them. Better to get them into the stock market with a couple of broad ETF’s, and maybe one or two “do you like this company” stocks like WalMart, McDonald’s, Exxon or similar.

Let them first discovered the joys of market appreciation before launching them into exotic strategies. You’re teaching them calculus, they’ve barely started to learn addition and subtraction.

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Over the years, a number of friends and coworkers asked me “how to make money in the stock market”. I start going into reading financial reports, following the news, and trying to extrapolate where certain companies are headed. They always cut me off with something like “I’m not taking that amount of time out of living my life”. Fine.

Steve

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I have the skill set. And I’m tutoring him. :slight_smile:

I’m NOT willing to let him go the ‘traditional’ way of ‘hit or miss financial education’.
I knew a couple of ‘millionaires’ when I was in my 20s. I wish one of them had taken the initiative to ‘pay their knowledge forward’ to me.
I was ‘interested’ and ‘willing to do the work’… but didn’t know how to ask them to teach me.
As the ‘teacher’… I’m pushing. I’m not ‘waiting’.
He’s not waiting, either. I’m very proud of him.

Yeah. Only ONE heir stepped forward, and is doing the work.
I’m not ‘forcing’ anyone. If she/he wants it… demonstrate that ‘want’. I’m willing to tutor.

:slight_smile:
ralph and no strings attached.

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I wish I would have had a mentor when I was younger. I had to learn it all on my own. But I tried teaching my younger brothers and they told me nobody follows financials. They just buy a stock. Oh well, they are out in the void doing their thing. But I still try to get people to wake up.

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Me, too.
Therefore, I’ve resolved to ‘push’ the topic.

And, hopefully, by starting this topic, some of you, my board colleagues, might think about being more vocal about ‘paying it forward’.
I’m also talking to a couple of other 20something yo, who are NOT related to me. Just casual friends of my friends. This is more sporadic, cause I don’t see them as often.
These youngsters have also indicated some interest, and are ‘investing with Robinhood’.

I do the ‘tutor’ via text messages. No in person contact required.

So. To YOU, dear reader, PAY IT FORWARD!
Be the shoulders that someone else stands on!

:slight_smile: :notebook:
ralph

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Hence the beauty of index investing. You beat the performance 95% of all investors and the amount of time spent is measured in minutes per year.

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The only financial education I got at home was that if I wanted money I had to earn it. I remember clearly watching my dad looking at the daily stock market quotes and thinking that there could not possibly be anything more boing that that. When I started investing my Financial Education was a blank slate. I devoured every relevant book I found and made all the errors one could make. Investing was the most difficult job I ever tried. There is a pile of Investing BS taken as God Given Lore [GGL] that would rival Mount Everest in height.

The most important lesson? You can’t go broke as long as you can pay your bills.

One of the most influential books I read was

It led me to study the Science of Complexity which debunks much old lore, specially in economics, which suffers from economists wanting their science to be as deterministic as physics. The irony is that the more we learn about physics the less deterministic it becomes. Schrödinger’s cat ? Wave, particle, or both? Universal constants changing? Dark matter? Dark energy? What’s beyond the event horizon? Where, exactly, are electrons? It turns out that much of the universe is not exact but probabilistic. The stock market? A melange of probabilities and animal spirits. Charting is not an exact science, it’s pictures of stock market animal spirits. Investing is not gambling but stock markets behave much like casinos, same mathematics apply. Just as you need to know the probabilities of casino games you need to know the probabilities of investment vehicles and individual securities. Power Law Distribution and the Kelly Criterion.

Is the above going to be taught in schools or is it Ph.D. level? BTW, I forgot something, physics is the same for everybody. Investing is not! What’s your goal? Making money? Preserving wealth? Something else?

The Captain

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