photo: echiner1/ BY-SA

The following was originally broadcast on KCBS, San Francisco:

By Arai Buendia
 

Last spring, during my last semester of high school, I read online that “the Dow Jones is down today,” and I thought: What the heck does that mean?

I’m Arai Buendia with a commentary from Youth Radio.

As a college-bound teenager I was scared that my lack of financial knowledge would lead me to make poor decisions with my student loans or develop bad credit – a common problem for undergrads. So over the summer I found a class in the Albany Adult School, called “Investing Strategies with Lilia.”

Most of my classmates were older than me by at least a decade. They’d had financial struggles and many of them lost their 401-K’s at the beginning of the recession. I thought, “Maybe if I get a head start now, I’ll avoid similar money problems.”

So I learned Wall Street’s vocabulary, the meanings of words like stocks, mutual funds and ETFs – that’s exchange traded funds to you. I grew to understand the very important difference between a necessity and luxury.

And most importantly, I learned the earlier you start thinking about money – whether saving it or investing it – the more confident you’ll feel about having enough of it in the future.