The best advice I never got: A father's guide to his children on investing their money

This advice is to help my children manage their money. I base it on almost 40 years of experience and it is advice that is objective, unbiased and will, hopefully, be helpful. There is no formal mechanism in our society to teach young adults how to manage their money. Of course there are hundreds of books that try to do this – although I suspect their main goal is to try to sell their books– but most of them give such general advice that they aren’t worth much. The reason that money management skills are so important is that if you can grow the money that you have saved and do a good job of it, this additional money can give you a better quality of life, better educational opportunities for your children and a better retirement. If you don’t do a good job of managing your savings and investment money, these things are harder to accomplish. There’s an old saying, you work hard for your money. The converse of this is you want your money to work hard for you.