You probably know a few people who are financial train wrecks waiting to happen. You, however, have a choice. You can watch them crash, or you can teach them some rules that they should have learned in school.

With luck, many of the principles in this book will become part of a mandatory high school curriculum. People want to learn this. When I taught high school personal finance, it was one of my school’s most popular electives. The school had class-size limitations and wasn’t supposed to break those limits. But I couldn’t, in good conscience, refuse any of the students who wanted to enroll.

Routinely, well-meaning counselors allowed my class sizes to swell beyond the maximum. I’m glad they did. One year, 40 percent of my American students opened index fund portfolios with Vanguard.

Those kids, and their parents, wanted to learn about money. They also wanted to teach. Many of my students recorded screencasts that they uploaded onto YouTube. They wanted to show how young investors could get started right away. I linked a few of them to this blog post at andrewhallam.com: andrewhallam.com/2013/04/high-school-students-open-investment-accounts/.

These students learned what we all should have learned in school:

1. Think and spend like a millionaire if you want to become rich.
2. Start investing early—after paying off credit card debt and any other high-interest loans.
3. Invest in low-cost index funds instead of actively managed funds. Nobody can consistently pick “winning” actively managed funds ahead of time.
4. Understand stock market history and psychology so you don’t fall victim to the craziness that infects every investing generation (often more than once).
5. Learn to build a complete, balanced portfolio of stock and bond index funds that will beat most professional investors after fees.
6. Create an indexed account no matter where you live.
7. Find low-cost financial advisory firms that build portfolios of index funds.
8. Learn to fight an adviser’s sales rhetoric.
9. Avoid investment schemes and scams that might tickle a greed button.

Live long, prosper, and please pass on what you learn.

Thank you!
Andrew