Compounding Snowballs

Over spring break my family and I went on a road trip to Montana. It was a total of 30 hours round trip, that meant many long hours of road trip games, we played all the classics, like license plate bingo, 20 questions, I’m going on a picnic, etc. When we play them we like to add our own little twist, for example, instead of license plate bingo we call it holdings bingo. 20 questions is played with a focus on stocks. And for I’m going on a picnic instead of what you are going to bring on a picnic it's what your requirements are for a stock. I know, we are a nerdy family. My favorite variation is ISpy, to my excitement we played that for many hours during this trip. How we play is plain and simple. The goal is to spot one of our holdings. It was quite difficult at times when we were driving through plains of barren land, aka North Dakota with nothing but hay and cows around. Don’t worry, we still made it fun by yelling, “HAY THERE” every time we spotted cut fields and trucks lo...

Before you can start investing you need to know a few basics. I have gotten a number of requests to write about tackling the idea of investing in a simple way. In this post, I am going to explain what a ticker symbol is, how to find a company, what numbers you need to pick a stock, and how to find them. There is so much push for kids to start investing, but who out there explains it? Investing can focus on either long term or short term holdings. I invest for the long term, hence the name of my blog; Compounding Snowballs. You want to take money that will be okay if it is put aside money for span of at least 5-10 years like college funds. Holding money in one stock for many years can be difficult, that's why patience is key. This money you invest will grow and grow but it takes time. When I am talking about long term investments I want to stress that the money that you put into these investments are not meant to be sold within 5-10 years. How Do I Find a Company? First...