I grew up in a similar situation, though not as dire. I definitely had to figure this stuff out for myself, and because of my own lack of research combined with memories of when my father basically lost what they had called my college fund picking stocks in the 90s (he thought things like Ricochet and wireless ISPs were the future...thanks dad, maybe 20 years early with the wrong players in the wrong country), I ended up not recognizing a great options opportunity at my company and contributing nothing to it for 2 years before our stock price increased roughly 15x (basically, I would have been a millionaire like some my other coworkers now are).
We also had the "houses are always a good investment" bit of advice, despite living in a much smaller house in a much crappier town than we could afford. They're currently back at about mid-90s levels value wise, and my family did a horrible job of maintaining our home, so the value is actually less now. This covers basically what happened: http://infographics.economist.com/2015/uscitieshpi_11_2015/?...
Needless to say, getting out a few years back was the best decision I could have made for my life and career in tech.
If you're a parent considering writing one of these letters, how can you fact-check yourself to ensure that you're not giving your children a huge disadvantage with terrible advice? I personally learned a lot from Investopedia and from messing around with Bitcoin in the early days (another opportunity where I could have made tens of thousands of dollars had I hung onto the 20BTC or so I had mined instead of selling them for $12/btc, happy to have paid for a new GPU I got just for the task).
> I ended up not recognizing a great options opportunity at my company and contributing nothing to it for 2 years before our stock price increased roughly 15x (basically, I would have been a millionaire like some my other coworkers now are).
No, it's hindsight and regret. It's funny because it would be similar to picking that stock, yet the same poster says his parents lost a lot by picking stocks so apparently that's a bad idea. It's easy to get confused about that when "you worked there" as if that automatically should have given you insider information about a 15x increase in the stock price. No, picking individual stocks is not usually a good idea and Enron taught the lesson about investing in your employer - if they go down you have no income and no savings.
We also had the "houses are always a good investment" bit of advice, despite living in a much smaller house in a much crappier town than we could afford. They're currently back at about mid-90s levels value wise, and my family did a horrible job of maintaining our home, so the value is actually less now. This covers basically what happened: http://infographics.economist.com/2015/uscitieshpi_11_2015/?...
Needless to say, getting out a few years back was the best decision I could have made for my life and career in tech.
If you're a parent considering writing one of these letters, how can you fact-check yourself to ensure that you're not giving your children a huge disadvantage with terrible advice? I personally learned a lot from Investopedia and from messing around with Bitcoin in the early days (another opportunity where I could have made tens of thousands of dollars had I hung onto the 20BTC or so I had mined instead of selling them for $12/btc, happy to have paid for a new GPU I got just for the task).