Robert Morris College, headquartered in Chicago and with five satellite locations, takes a value-added approach to student recruiting. It regularly publishes three newsletters for three different groups: SmartStart, for fifth- and sixth-grade students; What Next?, for high schoolers; and College Parenting, for the parents of these high schoolers. Contrary to taking a “selling” approach to promote the college, each publication offers news, tips, advice, entertainment, and other information pertinent and valuable to its respective audience—valuable whether or not the reader chooses Robert Morris College for higher education.
These publications are a joint effort of RMC’s director of public relations, CI Design of Milwaukee, and writer Jim Schoemer of JP Schoemer Communications. (Only articles written by Jim Schoemer appear below.)
In 2001, The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) awarded not one but two Circle of Excellence Awards to Robert Morris College.
Read the news release, but be warned: it includes my photo.
SmartStart newsletter
articles
One Step Closer to the Paperless Classroom
Where School is Nothing But Homework
I Want My MP3!
Fun Fact: Olympic Mascots
Money Matters: Which Type of Bank Account?
On The Job With... (Web Animator)
On The Job With... (Human Resources)
Reuse. Recycle. Recharge.
Chuckle Corner
Compound Interest—Not So Amazingly
Simple
What Next? newsletter articles
The Closet Cost of College
Take Time for Taxes
Day Trading and Play Trading
A Different Sort of College
Danger Ahead! The Wave and Rave of Ecstasy
Who Wants to be an Internet DJ?
Music Makes a Difference
College Parenting newsletter articles
Yuppie Food Stamps
Pick a Card, But Not Just Any Card
Have you ever heard the term “paperless classroom?” No, it doesn’t mean that you won’t have to write papers for school anymore. One thing it does mean, though, is that more and more of the tools and resources you do your schoolwork with are computer based.
One such resource became available free on the Web for the first time in October 1999: the complete Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Anything that you used to find by flipping through heavy encyclopedia volumes for hours in the library you can now find in seconds with a keyword search on www.britannica.com.
An encyclopedia PLUS
In addition to finding out the Native American tribes of Alaska, this site also lets you look up the meaning of the word “incorrigible” in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, find out about the lastest news in the presidential election, and search for a magazine article on Ricky Martin.
With more than 72,000 articles, 10,000 images, and links to about 75 magazines and newspapers, www.brittanica.com is a tremendous source of information. Just as important, the site provides a trusted stamp of approval to the reliability of information you find—not always the case on the Internet.
Too free or not too free
About the only drawback to this site is that you will have to sift through advertising as you research the Civil War, anything from computers to books to games to flowers. If you want to avoid this, plus have access to even more images and other bells and whistles, you can subscribe to the company’s advertising-free site, www.eb.com, for just five dollars a month, and test drive it with a 14-day free trial. Or you can purchase the CD set, faster than the Internet and complete with audio and video, for around 50 dollars.
Keep your integrity
While an electronic encyclopedia is a fantastic resource to students, don’t fall into the trap of using copy and paste as a replacement for your own words. Whether you’re copying information from a hard-bound volume or by using a computer command, your work still needs to just that—YOURS, paperless or not.
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Home schooling is growing as a way to get an education.
Imagine learning in a school with no bells, no classrooms, no buses, and not even any textbooks or grades. Doesn’t sound much like a school at all, does it? Yet more than one million American children are getting their education this way. Not in a traditional school, but at home.
Home schooling is a form of education in which a parent serves as a child’s teacher, and the learning happens right in the home, not in the classroom. It emphasizes learning as a process of reading, creating, and experiencing.
Parents who choose home schooling do so to not subject their children to the academic pressure, potential violence, and peer pressure of schools, as well as to spend more time with their children and give them more one-on-one attention.
A common approach is to hold some sort of lessons in the morning, and keep the afternoon open for projects. Textbooks are usually not used. Instead, workbooks and, more significantly, actual hands-on experiences, form the basis of the learning. Rather than try to recreate a classroom at home, home schooling stresses the flexibility to determine the subjects, schedule, and learning style that are most interesting and meaningful to the student, and explore the material in a family setting.
“In classroom settings, where it is so age segregated, it’s so unlike life,” says Terri Wright, a full-time mom and home school teacher. “But here we try to do things we can all do together, we get together with families and kids of all ages, and our children are able to interact not only with each other, but adults as well.”
Home schooling may still cover traditional subject areas like math and social studies, but does it more by experience than by the book. For example, one home school student learned about both math and business by talking with real estate agents when his parents purchased a new home.
Another common aspect of home schooling is including life skills and experiences in the curriculum. A 13-year old works two days a week a mechanic’s apprentice, while his 11-year-old sister works mornings at a neighbor’s stable, taking care of the horses in exchange for riding lessons. Practical skills such as cooking and cleaning are also often included as part of the overall learning process.
Teacher organizations like the National Education Association have historically been against home schooling. Charles Erickson of the NEA says, “The child’s first and best teacher is his/her parent, and we readily accept that. But... you want to get someone who’s been taught to do it, so everyone has the same opportunity to learn under a qualified professional.” The other common argument is that home-schooled children don’t develop the social skills or have the opportunity to participate in activities like traditional students.
But according to a 1999 study by Lawrence M. Rudner, education expert from the University of Maryland, “Home-school student achievement test scores are exceptionally high. The median scores for every subtest at every grade (typically in the 70th to 80th percentile) are well above those of public and private-school students.” Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, maintains that home schoolers typically have higher self-esteem, with local recreation departments, YMCAs, clubs, theater groups, arts centers, scouting, 4-H, and church groups offering plenty of opportunity to interact with others.
In 1997, Rebecca Sealfon, 13, became the first home-schooled student to win the National Spelling Bee. Over 700 colleges and universities have accepted home-schooled students, including biggies like Harvard and MIT.
Each state has different rules and regulations about home schooling, but most do require an annual test. You knew there had to be a down side.
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Ever hear your parents joking around about their old eight tracks? Don’t have a clue what those might be, do you? And you may have never actually owned an album or played a record, even though your parents probably have a couple of boxes of them up in the attic. You probably have some music on cassettes, but those seem to be a thing of the past. Most of your music is probably on CDs. But are you up to speed on the next revolution in music?
It’s called MP3, which stands for Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) Audio Layer 3. It’s a computer format that compresses digital music into small packages so that songs may be transmitted over the Internet and stored on your computer.
There are currently dozens of sites where you can search for and download music from your favorite artists for free. One particularly innovative site is Napster, an online community in which users share MP3s with other users. In the past year, Napster has grown from having about 100 users online at any one time to as many as 1.3 million today, with 50 million registered users.
To join the revolution, just download a free MP3 player such as WinAmp or MacAmp from one of the sites listed under Cool Crawls, install it, and you’re off . Once downloaded, you can listen to your MP3s on your computer’s speakers, store them on CDs (if you have a CD-recordable drive), or, for less than $200, buy an MP3 player (about the size of a deck of cards) and listen just like you do with a WalkMan.
In addition to being free (see sidebar), MP3s offer sound quality almost equal to CDs at 1/12 the file size, don’t have the hiss that cassettes do, and don’t skip. Plus, every song is a good one, because you’re the one who picked them all out. The only real down side is that they take a long time to download over Internet connections that are not high speed. A three-minute song is about three megabytes, and takes 15 to 20 minutes to download with a 56K modem.
(sidebar)
Get it now while it’s free
In the face of free MP3 music distribution over the Internet, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Big Five record companies spent most of 2000 in court. These powerful entities sued Napster, MP3.com, and others, saying that they were violating copyright law.
A judge ruled against Napster in July, but the case was appealed two days later, and has yet to be resolved. In November, MP3.com settled lawsuits with each of the Big Five labels for a combined total of more than $130 million.
No one knows yet how these legal battles will affect the MP3 revolution. But as of now, there’s a lot of free music still out there so, if you’re into music and technology, get connected and start downloading.
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Does your school have a mascot? You know: some animal or character that represents your school, especially visible at sporting events? Did you know that each Olympics has its own mascots, too?
For the Summer Olympic Games held in Sydney, Australia, this past September, the mascots were a platypus and an echidna (the only two mammals in the world that lay eggs) and a kookaburra. Olympic mascots got their start in the 1968 Winter Games in Grenoble, Switzerland, and have been part of every Olympics since then.
Why do the Olympics have mascots? One reason is simply to add warmth and interest to the Olympic experience for the participants and spectators. “Mascots are the first and most lasting recognizable connection people make to an Olympics,” according to Bob Christianson, collector of Olympic mascot items for the past 23 years. “They speak for the Games and their cities.”
Another reason for mascots isn’t so warm and fuzzy, but very important: money. Olympic committees raise about one third of their budget from merchandising sales and fees from sponsors who use the mascots to advertiser their products.
That’s why mascot selection is so important. If the Olympic committees don’t select mascots that the public finds appealing, sales can suffer and those hosting cities can lose big money on the Games. After each Olympics is over, the mascots continue to be valuable finds to collectors like Christianson.
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Money Matters: Which Type of Bank Account?
Here are the types of accounts available at most banks and what makes them different from each other. There are differences from bank to bank on what the minimum balances, service charges, and ATM fees are so, if you’re looking to open an account, be sure to shop around.
Passbook savings: This is a simple account in which every time you go to the bank to make a deposit or withdrawal, a notation is made in your passbook. This is well suited to you if you don’t have a formal savings plan and make few transactions.
Regular savings: With this account you get a monthly statement that reports all account activity for the month. It can be linked to a checking account and offer an ATM (automated teller machine) card. It is a good choice if you have a regular (even if limited) income.
High-interest savings: This works just like regular savings, except that you need to carry a minimum balance. In return, the bank will pay you a higher rate of interest. If you can maintain the balance, the interest will be worth your keeping your hands off it.
Certificate of deposit (CD): Unlike any of the savings accounts above, CDs aren’t liquid, or accessible at any time. Instead, you deposit a fixed amount of money for a fixed amount of time (usually at least three months). Banks pay higher interest rates on CDs than on savings accounts to reward you for your patience.
Regular checking: This gives you the privilege of writing checks for a low- or no-monthly fee, and may or may not have a minimum balance.
Interest checking: This works like a regular checking account except that it earns interest like a savings account. You’ll probably have to watch your minimum balance again, however. If you earn more interest than you pay in fees and service charges, this is the checking account for you.
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Depending on the size of a company, there is a person or entire department whose only job is to take care of everyone else that works for that company. This job is called Human Resources.
Andrea works as a Benefits Specialist in the Human Resources Deparment for a telecommunications firm. Her current primary responsibility is to administer the company’s benefit package to all employees.
Benefits are things a company offers its employees in addition to a pay check to help keep them happy, healthy, and motivated to help the company succeed. They include things like health, life, and disability insurance, retirement funds, flexible spending dollars, and other services employees want.
“I really enjoy helping people understand what they’ve got available to them. There is a real sense of satisfaction because we have an awesome benefits package, and it’s great to show people how to use it to their greatest advantage.”
Aside from benefits administration, human resources jobs can involve recruitment and hiring, compensation and payroll, compliance with government regulations, collective bargaining (for businesses with unions), and policy making and enforcement. In smaller companies, one person might be responsible for all of these, while, in larger companies, human resources staff concentrate on one or several of them.
A bachelor’s degree in human resouces or business management is usually required to get a job in the human relations field, and entry-level positions usually involve serving first as an assistant, then as specialist after gaining hands-on experience.
Andrea cites excellent listening skills, a sense of empathy, attention to detail, and the ability to be a counselor as important qualities of human resources professionals, as well as being very people oriented. She says the people aspect can be tricky, however. You have to deal with discipline for people who aren’t doing their jobs and people who are sick and going through terrible health problems. “In our department, we joke around and say, ‘We always said we wanted to work with people, and this isn’t what we had in mind.’”
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You know those things on Web sites that catch your eye? Those glitzy things that flash, spin, or move on their own, or change when you move your mouse over a certain spot? What you are seeing is the work of a Web animator.
Just like most Internet-related jobs, you wouldn’t have found this in a jobs catalog or employment outlook until just a few years ago.
Chris Wing is a Web animator at a graphic design firm. He likens Web animation to traditional animation. “Animators like those at Disney don’t come up with the ideas—storyboard artists do that. It’s usually the animator’s job to take that two-dimensional image and bring it into three dimensions. What we do in Web is very similar. I get a layout from an artist and we talk about how it should be animated: what should work, what buttons should trigger what effects, etc. It’s then my job to make that two-dimensional presentation into a moving representation.”
So how did Chris prepare for his career as a Web animator? With a college degree in poetry, naturally. Actually, Chris says he enjoyed his college experience tremendously and learned a lot, but realized that there was not a lot of money in poetry unless you’re the next Robert Frost. After a conversation with a friend, he decided to learn about programming pages for this new thing called the Internet.
After several years of experience and the sweeping advances in Internet technology, he has moved from Web page layout into animation. He says you don’t really have to be an artist for this job, just have a head for problem solving and a comfort level with technology.
While Chris is mostly self-taught, as are many who have been in the field for several years, more and more colleges are offering classes and entire programs on Internet careers. Learning opportunities on the Internet itself, of course, are also a great way to get a head start.
What’s the best part of being a Web animator? According to Chris, “Every day I deal with a different situation. Always a problem to be solved or something to be improved so it’s easier or faster. No two days are ever the same.”
You can see some of Chris’s work first hand on the Web sites below. Remember: if it moves, it’s his.
www.cidesigninc.com
www.cidesigninc.com/test/colorink
www.cidesigninc.com/test/ia
http://members.telocity.com/cwing
The number of careers related to the Internet is growing almost as fast as the Internet itself. Check with your guidance counselor on these high-tech (and very cool) careers.
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Doesn’t it seem like your batteries are constantly running out of juice? A good alternative is to use rechargeable batteries for your Game Boy, CD player, or whatever. Once you make the modest initial investment in a charger and rechargeable batteries, you’re home free.
You can pick these up in the electronics department at most discount stores. A charger I looked at was just $17.47, and eight AA batteries were about $24. Since these batteries (made of nickel metal hydride, or NiMH) may be recharged at least 1,000 times, you should get at least a couple of years’ use out of them. An eight-pack of name-brand alkaline batteries at the same store cost about $6. Now let’s do some math.
If you believe the specs from Game Boy, for example, alkaline batteries are supposed to last about 35 hours, while rechargeables last about 15 hours. You have a Game Boy habit of eight hours a week (that’s way too much, you know, but hopefully it’s just an example). Your habit will cost you about $72 bucks a year, or about six bucks a month, in regular batteries.
If you go rechargeable, your initial investment of a little over $40 will cost you not a cent more, and, spread out over, say, two years, that comes to $1.73 per month.
The only drawback is that their charge is shorter and you have to remember to stick them back in the charger. But you were smart enough to buy eight, not four, so you always have spares ready to go when the other ones quit.
The only other consideration is the cost of electricity to recharge them, but, hey, that’s on your parents’ nickel (so to speak). Well, at least for now.
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Haven’t heard of these new music groups yet? Actually, you probably have. See if you can figure out their real names!
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You’ve probably already learned what interest is and how to calculate it in math class. Actually, interest isn’t that simple—literally. While you may know about simple interest, you may be amazed at the miracle of compound interest.
In the real world, you earn interest not only on what you put in, called principal, but also interest on the interest. Once this starts happening, your money grows much faster, and how it grows over several years is really amazing, especially at higher interest rates. And because it’s your money, not the kid’s in your math book, you should be very interested.
Let’s see how this works for a couple different types of
accounts. Don’t worry if you don’t know what some of
these accounts are. For now we just want to demonstrate compound
interest. Let’s assume you open your account with $500, and
you contribute 10 dollars a month for five years (coincidentally
just about the time you’ll be financing college!). Plus,
just to show you how this plays out when you’re an adult,
we’ve done a 25-year projection as well. You’ll also
see mutual funds with two different interest rates to demonstrate
how big a difference a few points can make when we’re
talking compound interest.
| Account type | Typical interest rate | after 5 years | after 25 years |
| Savings account | 2% | $1,184 | $4,720 |
| Bank certificate of deposit (CD) | 5.75% | $1,363 | $8,820 |
| Mutual fund | 8% | $1,486 | $13,309 |
| Mutual fund | 12% | $1,737 | $29,212 |
| Principal paid in: $1,100 |
Principal paid in: $3,500 |
It is important to note that savings accounts and CDs are guaranteed and have a fixed interest rate, while mutual funds are not guaranteed and interest rates fluctuate.
Wanna try it for yourself?
There are lots of Web sites with free interest calculators. Just
enter the keywords “compound, interest, calculator.” Or
you can go right to the one we used to come up with the numbers
in the example: www.geocities.com/tokyo/8109/interest.html.
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When you and your parents ponder how you’re going to pay for college, you’re probably thinking tuition, lodging, and books. Fact is, however, these items represent only half the financial challenge. Equally challenging, and substantially more ubiquitous, is managing your personal finances in the strange, exciting, and scary new culture known as “on your own.” Yup, this is one more place where the word your parents and teachers increasingly fill your ears with—responsibility—really starts to kick in. Prepare now for a drastic lifestyle change.
It’s the little things of day-to-day life that pose this challenge, and the ease of obtaining and using a credit card for them that fuels the fire. In the case of college students, the biggest culprits are concerts, movies, travel, and food, as identified by Ellen Braitman, consumer writer and author of the book, Dollars and Sense for College Students, or How Not to Run Out of Money by Midterms. How serious is the problem? About 70 percent of all undergrads at four-year colleges have a credit card, and the average balance is $2,000. Some 14 percent are carrying a balance between $3,000 and $7,000, and 10% owe more than $7,000.*
Just as your studies and your grades have a substantial impact the rest of your life, so, too, does how you manage yourself financially while in school. According to Braitman, “As a student you need to budget not only your time for class, study, fun, and work, but also your day-to-day expenses as well.” How well you do this is the difference between leaving college educated and virtually debt free vs. deeply in debt and with a bad credit rap sheet.
It’s not easy to concentrate on your studies when you’re stressed out about your finances. Says Sabrina, a freshman at the University of Washington in Seattle, “I was overdrawn last month, and that cost twenty bucks. I’m kind of worried about how I’m going to be able to have enough to survive at college and not be like the starving student... I don’t want to start out with bad credit.”
Of course, you expect to carry some debt into the postgrad work force. There is a profound difference, however, between what you owe on your student loan and what you could potentially owe from maxxed-out credit cards caused by poor money handling. Student loans are deferred until graduation, low interest, have low payments, and the interest is tax deductible. Credit card debt, by contrast, requires minimum monthly payments, charges high interest rates, has a laundry list of fees (hidden and otherwise), and is specifically designed to keep you paying for a long time.
There’s a reason these hidden costs of college are still in a closet. In a recent questionnaire on basic personal finance, high school seniors averaged the meager score of 51.9 percent—an F on any academic scale. Today, according to columnist Janet Bodnar, (also known to her readers as Dr. Tightwad), only 64 percent of high school students have courses in personal finance available, and only 34 percent have enrolled.
The author of the study, Lewis Mandell, dean of the University at Buffalo School of Management, underscores the importance of education in this area. “Experience alone is not a very good teacher. Unless it’s accompanied by conceptual or theoretical understanding, experience adds nothing to a young adult’s ability to maneuver today’s complex world of financial services.”
Thus the importance of learning to manage your own personal finances now, as a high schooler, before making that leap into adulthood, where the consequences of financial mistakes are definitely out of the closet and pay a far greater—and more permanent—price.
* Source: Janet Bodnar, Money-Smart Kids (and Parents, Too!), Kiplinger Books, 1997.
(“Hints from Heloise” is a handy tips book and frequent fixture on many daytime talk shows. We’ve adapted our own version of it for you, coming from her purely fictional college kid.)
(callouts)
Sasha the Savvy Saver
• Buys toilet paper by the case at Sam’s Club
• Writes long letters to her boyfriend in Washington
• Watches rented movies with her roommates
• Treats herself to a meal at her favorite restaurant when
her checkbook balances every month
Credit card balance at graduation: $0
Steven the Spoiled Spender
• Shops the mall for university sweatshirts
• Buys pizza for himself and his roomies
• Picks up an expresso every morning on the way to class
• Faithfully pays the minimum due on one credit
card—using his other credit card
Credit card balance at graduation: $3,000–$7,000+
www.jumpstartcoalition.org
www.moneyopolis.com
www.smithbarney.com
www.kidsbank.com
www.treas.gov/kids
www.youngmoney.com
www.nefe.org
(callout and list)
Other scary findings of the Jump$tart survey (all statements are
false):
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YES! Your first job, your first paycheck. Not to burst your bubble, but your first paycheck might be a bit smaller than you expect. Welcome to the wonderful world of income tax.
It’s probably okay, though, because the Internal Revenue Service makes it easy—literally with its form 1040EZ—for you to file. Better yet, you may well have money coming back. Whether you do or not and, if so, how much, depend on two interrelated things: what you earn and how many exemptions you claim on the W4 form you fill out before you begin work.
The W4 determines if and how much money is withheld from your paycheck. Typically a student will designate no more than one exemption (for yourself). Even more commonly, however, you can exempt yourself completely from withholding if your earnings aren’t that large. See the criteria on line seven of the form to determine if you are exempt from withholding or not. Ultimately your choice doesn’t increase or decrease what is paid in or refunded—just whether money changes hands on pay day or on tax day. Don’t panic—you can change your withholding at any time by asking your employer.
The amount withheld, if any, appears on your check stub, and you receive a W2 statement from your employer in January with your total earnings and amounts withheld for the prior year. If your 1999 gross income (including wages plus interest and other income) is less than $7,050, you don’t have to file, but should if your employer withholds any federal or state tax. You should get back 100 percent of the withheld amount. If you make more than $7,050, however, you must file taxes, and will either get a portion of your withholding back or have to pay in, depending again on what you earned and how much was withheld.
One other note about deductions appearing on your paycheck: all employees are subject to Social Security and Medicare tax, which are a flat percent of your gross wages. It does not affect your income tax or return, and is not recoverable (at least probably not for another 45 years or so). Sorry. State, and sometimes local, tax withholding also appears, and varies by your locale.
All students, including students claimed as dependents on their parents’ taxes, can file, and IRS form 1040EZ is just what it says it is—a plain and simple way for most students to file a return that takes just a few minutes to complete. This process generally holds true, too, by the way, for filing most state income taxes. Filing might get you a few hundred extra bucks for college, and it will for sure give you some experience for filing returns after college when you’re making the really big bucks.
“Teaching our summer help how taxation
works is important… I insist that all of my new employees
visit the IRS’s TAXinteractive Web site.”
(www.irs.gov/taxi/learninglab/payday/index.html)
- Rosa Rosario, owner of Rosa’s Roses in Tyler, Texas, and
employer of summer student help
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Today’s investors have a whole different look to them.
If, when you were back in grade school, your social studies teacher asked you to envision what a typical “investor” would look like, you probably would have conjured an image of a balding man in a three-piece suit wearing those little glasses slid halfway down his nose. And you wouldn’t have been far off.
Today, the image of an investor could just as easily be a kid with a spiked orange mohawk wearing baggy pants and a silver stud in his nose.
The Internet, of Course
Investing in the stock market has always been available (through a parent-authorized account) to kids, but the interactivity and real-time immediacy of the Internet has attracted young investors in droves. There are dozens of online brokers, some part of traditional firms like Charles Schwab and American Express, some strictly cyberfirms. It makes for a kind of real-world Nintendo game, and, to many, it’s just as addicting. However, unlike Nintendo, the consequences are far more serious.
Many kids get involved before they even hit the age of ten, which happens to be the average age of Stein Roe Young Investor’s Fund’s shareholders. Before they start day trading, many learn by “play trading.” Several Web sites and services (AOL, e-trade.com, estocktrading.net) allow individuals to create an imaginary portfolio and track its performance. Some also run stock market games in which you start with, say, $100,000 in imaginary money to invest as you wish, then see how well you do against others.
Each year, nationwide, 250,000 fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders compete in “The Stock Market Game,” a stock market simulation sponsored by the Securities Industry Foundation for Economic Education and administered through schools. One educator in Rye, New York, who teaches the game to fifth graders, says her students learn both business and math at the same time: “They’re so excited that they can finally understand what all these numbers mean. That’s my favorite part.”
Let the trading begin… but when?
Jon, 14, says, “Kids should start investing around the high-school level because middle-schoolers don’t know much about the stock market and will probably buy stocks that are more of trends than ones that will actually appreciate. But I do think they should invest because they know what companies are doing well and which ones aren’t. I’ve almost doubled my imaginary portfolio’s value in about two months.”
Others disagree. Rick, a parent, says, “Let’s not confuse trading with investing. Teaching your child the importance of saving and investing is part of raising them to be self-sufficient adults. Despite how easy trading looks to some people, it is an adult game. Teaching children to respect the value of money and the power of markets is probably more important now than ever… the goal should be teaching smart investing.”
One point of agreement is that trading, whether real or imaginary, should happen with parents as the reality check. Parental involvement might be in the form of advice and direction from someone knowledgeable about investing or, for parents new to the stock market, learning smart investing together.
How to get online
Legally you must be 18 or older to own an account, but if you work it out with your parents, they can open an account in their name and let you have a say in how its managed. Remember, however, to do your homework before you invest. It’s just as easy to lose money as it is to trade online. Here’s how to get started in online trading.
1. Select a site to use for investing.
2. Open an account.
3. Select the type of money market account you want (the site should have explanations of your options).
4. Sign and mail your agreement form along with the specified payment information.
5. Wait for an e-mail notifying you your account is active.
6. Select your investments and begin trading.
(Sidebar)
Not only are there lots of sites happy to accept your money to
invest, there are also many sites devoted to help you learn about
investing and conduct that all-important research. Here are a few
of the better, most unbiased ones:
Online Trading Academy: www.tradingacademy.com/
Links to over 100 other Web sites that provide information and
other services to the direct electronic stock trader.
Smart Money: www.smartmoney.com
Full-service financial and investment advice, including "Map
of the Market," a pictorial representation of the entire
S&P 500 Index.
Intelligent Charts: www.iqc.com
Printable technical charts, with a very good education center
that includes explanations of chart patterns, technical studies,
and candlestick chart patterns.
Yahoo! Finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/
General overview of the financial markets, trading game, and a
number of chat sites.
NASDAQ: www.nasdaq.com/
A great resource on the NASDAQ and Amex markets directly from the
exchange, with 25 separate main pages or services including a
recap of earning surprises from NASDAQ companies.
The Investment FAQ: www.invest-faq.com/
Answers your questions with an intelligent search engine or
allows you to choose from a list of categories.
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With all the polls and surveys that take place before presidential elections, it sometimes seems as though the election is over before it actually takes place. This year, however, quite the opposite was true, with the results not known even weeks after the election took place.
The bizarre circumstances in the state of Florida during the 2000 election has raised questions not only about the balloting process, but also on the entire voting structure in our country and, specifically, popular votes vs. electoral votes.
To briefly review, each state has a number of electors equal to its number of senators (always two) plus its number of representatives to the House (varies by population). In each state, political parties submit a list of electors pledged to their presidential candidate. Electors are the ones who cast the actual vote for president on the Monday following the second Wednesday in December, and comprise the Electoral College. Which party’s set of electors gets to vote is determined by the popular vote in each state. You win the popular vote in a state, you get all the electoral votes for that state. You lose, you get none.
Before the election, both major candidates have a pretty good idea, through polls, which states they can expect to win, which they can’t, and which ones could go either way. These are the states where they concentrate most of their efforts in the last few weeks prior to election day. For this election, such states included Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and, of course, Florida.
So even though Al Gore received more popular votes than George W. Bush, Bush won because he captured states totaling more electoral votes. This happened once before, in 1888, when Grover Cleveland won the popular vote, but Benjamin Harrison won the electoral vote.
There are many who say the Electoral College is no longer an appropriate system of electing a president. They feel it is not needed, as the popular vote adequately reflects the wishes of the people of this country. Others argue that it helps to balance public opinion geographically, metro vs. rural, and across minorities, and create a more stable, two-party government.
Whichever your opinion, presidential races as close as these serve to remind us of the importance of voting. Not so much that an election could be decided by as little as one vote, but more so that it allows each of us to participate in a political process that was ingeniously designed by our founding fathers, a critical element of our government.
Even if you’re not old enough to vote right now, it is important that you understand the process and your role in it for when you are 18.
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History Lesson
Minnesota’s House Governmental Operations and Veterans Affairs Policy Committee currently has a bill on the table, HF1250, that would lower the voting age to 16 in that state. Here are other milestones in the history of voting:
Amendment XV: Race no bar to vote. Ratified 2/3/1870.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Amendment XIX: Women's suffrage. Ratified 8/18/1920.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Amendment XXVI: Voting age set to 18 years. Ratified 7/1/1971.
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.
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Danger Ahead! The Wave and Rave of Ecstasy
Loud music. Dancing. Drinking. And, oh yeah, Drugs.
They’re rave parties, and they’re the breeding ground for the alarming spread of the drug known as “Ecstasy.” The news media have labeled it America’s newest drug problem, spreading more quickly than any other illegal drug. The physical and mental effects it has on its users can last a lifetime.
In the chemistry lab Ecstasy is known as methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA. At parties and in dance clubs it’s also known as “E,” “X,” or “XTC.” But no matter where you are or what you call it, its immediate effects include loss of drives such as hunger, sleep, and sex; muscle tension, burred vision, tremors, nausea, fainting, or death. Long-term effects include anorexia, high blood pressure, kidney failure, and stroke.
The drug acts as a stimulant, and has some hallucinogenic properties as well. Ecstasy is chemically related to the “love drugs” of the 60s and 70s, named for the “high” they produced. As one former user describes it: “Everyone’s your brother; everyone’s your sister; everyone’s your best friend.” Yet he continues, “I’ll never touch that stuff again. Ever, ever. No, never.”
MDMA started hitting the streets in the 70s, but growing awareness of the harmful effects of the drug prompted the U.S. government to declare it illegal in 1985. Still, use of the drug spread within the psychedelia of the rave party. Today, Ecstasy use has gone beyond the bounds of raves and become a part of everyday young adult pop culture. CBS News quotes law enforcement officials as saying, “Ecstasy used to be associated only with raves, but now it is spreading so fast among so many people that I’m really afraid we’re going to have a generation of depressed people.”
While overall trial drug use among teens age 12 to 18 declined from 53 percent in 1997 to 48 percent in 2000 according to a Partnership for a Drug-Free America survey, ten percent of have tried Ecstasy, up from seven percent the previous year and five percent five years ago.
Ecstasy causes long-lasting damage to areas of the brain that are critical for thought and memory. Research findings from Johns Hopkins University using red spider monkeys demonstrated that four days of exposure to the drug caused damage that persisted up to seven years later. Other Hopkins research found that people who had taken MDMA scored lower on memory tests. Alan I. Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health stresses, “At the very least, people who take MDMA, even just a few times, are risking long-term, perhaps permanent, problems with learning and memory.”
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Who Wants to be an Internet DJ?
Did you think it was pretty cool when computers started coming with CD drives that also let you listen to your favorite audio CDs? Well, thanks to the Internet, the music you listen to while at the computer is no longer limited by how many CDs fit in your rack, how many MP3s fit on your hard drive, or how many radio stations are in your local market.
Have you tuned in any online radio stations yet? If not, you’ll be amazed at the incredible variety of music out there.
Actually, online radio is a bit of an oxymoron, since online implies a physical connection between your computer and the Web via phone line or cable. Radio, on the other hand, refers to radio waves that travel through the air to be received by a remote source with no physical connection.
Nonetheless, there are actual radio stations that simulcast their programming over the Web. But by far the larger number of online radio stations aren’t radio stations at all, but personal collections of songs and other digital recordings made available as a "channel" to anyone visiting a site that serves as a radio station "portal."
Live365
One such site, www.Live365.com, currently has more than 24,000 such stations available for broadcast. The site allows you to search for radio stations by key words (e.g., Jamaican, traditional) and by genre (dance, hip-hop, 80s).
It’s a great way to find just the station you’re looking for, like the hottest Burmese music, or to discover strange new music like technoambient world folk (no kidding–these are actual stations on Live365).
Your Turn
In the other direction, you can take the virtual DJ seat yourself and create your own Internet radio station, for free. Live365 allows you to transfer your music to its server and, after filling in some information about yourself and completing a description of your radio station, become a part of a global music community. In most cases, radio stations aren’t really "live," but continuous loops that repeat themselves every so often.
Been putting together a list of your favorite all-time guitar hero songs? Think you have the definitive list of 80s dance songs? Well you can turn your list into the next online radio station, and find out if others around the world agree with you.
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At home, at the mall, even in the dentist chair, music is everywhere. You might be one of those people who is keenly aware of and sensitive to music that surrounds you. Or maybe music affects you subconsciously. Maybe you’re somewhere in between, depending on your mood and environment.
In any case, you may not be aware that music isn’t just a form of entertainment, but a part of your culture, personality, and learning style.
Ancient civilizations as far back as recorded history have used music and dance as a means of expression, and have developed styles and instruments that uniquely reflect their cultures.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), spoke eloquently of how music interacts with us as people: “Music directly represents the passions or states of the soul–gentleness, anger, courage, temperance. If a person habitually listens to the kind of music that rouses ignoble passions, his whole character will be shaped to an ignoble form. In short, if one listens to the wrong kind of music he will become the wrong kind of person. But conversely, if he listens to the right kind of music he will tend to become the right kind of person.” (Aristotle, Republic, Politics, 8, 1340, quoted in Donald J. Grout, A History of Western Music, 1980, p. 8.)
More recently, the Department of Education has found that students who play a musical instrument tend to perform better academically in math and reading. “Music has lots of mathematical aspects to it, so being involved in music sort of conducts your brain to thinking fluidly, mathematically,” said James Catterall, the UCLA professor who headed the study.
If the only instrument you know how to play is the radio, don’t despair. Music can still help you learn. There’s probably not a kid in this country who didn’t learn the alphabet with the ABC song. For those past the toddler stage, research has also found that the right kind of background music helps some students study better. The trick is finding something that is mind stimulating without being distracting.
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College is About Getting Credits—not Credit Cards
You probably know how your child pays for tuition, room and board, and books. But what about those day-to-day expenses like food, utilities, and entertainment? Does he or she practice responsible personal financial management?
The statistics are alarming. About 70 percent of all undergrads at four-year colleges have a credit card, and the average balance is $2,000. Some 14 percent are carrying a balance between $3,000 and $7,000, and 10% owe more than $7,000.* The ease of obtaining and using credit cards has earned them the nickname “yuppie food stamps” among some students.
Managing your own personal finances is tough enough, so you can’t expect your kids to “just know” how to manage money on their own, and understand the substantial long-term impacts of indebtedness and poor credit.
Only about 10 percent of students have had a personal finance course by the time they enter college, and the lure of instant money (i.e., credit cards) is hard to resist for those uninformed about personal finance.
Be sure to discuss the importance of personal financial management with your child to help ensure he or she won’t leave college and enter the work force with thousands of dollars of debt weighing them down.
* Source: Janet Bodnar, Money-Smart Kids (and Parents, Too!), Kiplinger Books, 1997.
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Pick a Card, But Not
Just Any Card
No matter what your child uses for walking-around money, it is probably best for you to disburse it monthly, not as a lump sum up front.
ATM Card: This allows your child to withdraw money anytime and get an instant printed record of the transaction. Stress the importance of keeping track of all withdrawals, as well as any transaction fees, to avoid overdrawing the account. Accounts may be limited to a set amount per transaction per day to help prevent overuse.
Debit Card: These carry a credit card logo and are used like credit cards. However, the money is withdrawn directly from your child’s checking account, so there are no interest charges, although some financial institutions may charge fees for debit card use. Debit cards also allow cardholders to withdraw cash from their checking accounts like an ATM card. Advise your child to enter debit card transactions in their checkbooks and track their account balances closely to prevent overdrafts. All account transactions appear on a monthly statement to help track spending.
Smart Card: These newer forms of plastic store cash right on the card. They are typically used for small purchases, such as bus fares, laundry machines and parking meters. Since your child can spend only the amount of cash loaded into the card, smart cards may help him or her stick to a budget. After the card’s value is depleted, it can be replenished. With some smart cards, no identification, signature or payment authorization is required, so losing the card is just like losing cash. Other smart cards can be secured with a PIN. Many universities today are issuing smart cards to their students, combining features such as student ID, ATM, meal, and activity cards.
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