For those of your out there with teenage kids (or grandkids), you might be thinking how best to help them get the best possible start in life.
As well as the provision of a good education, possibly the next most important decision a parent can make for the young ones in their lives is to establish and commit to a long-term savings and investments plan.
Now, although it's true that teenagers don't have a lot of money, what they do have is a lot of time: your teenager has at least 50 years in front of them to take advantage of the stock market's ability to create long-term wealth.
Imagine this: the establishment of a savings plan of $200 per month, being put aside quietly in the background until they're at the stage where they can continue this themselves once they reach full-time employment, say by age 26.
Assuming $1,000 down on the investor's 15th birthday, $200 socked away each month, and providing an average annual 7% real rate of return, your teenager's investment 11 years later would have grown to $41,753.
If your now-adult child has taken a keen interest in this investment plan and decides to continue with it for the next 39 years, he or she would be sitting on a nice $1,122,395 at age 65.
(That's $121,000 down for an investment return of $1,001,395, excluding the effect of taxes).
But you know, I think a 15-year-old today, with parents or grandparents able to help with the plan at the beginning, can do much better than this if their commitment remains.
What he or she needs to do is to invest in younger, smaller companies with all of the associated risks these entail. However, these are risks that a young person can and should take on.
Here are three companies for consideration:
Superloop Ltd (ASX: SLC)
Here's a business that came to the public markets only in June 2015 and yet has already risen in value by 57%.
Despite a blow-out in losses between 2014-15 and 2015-16, the market has so far acknowledged that the business is still very much in the construction and development phase.
Promoted as Asia's newest telecommunications provider, it designs, constructs, and operates networks throughout major metropolitan centres in the Asia Pacific region and is currently valued at just under $400m.
As an extremely young, immature and higher-risk business, but with plenty of growth potential in front of it, a small position in Superloop can be considered for any young investor's portfolio.
Reckon Limited (ASX: RKN)
It's easy to disregard Reckon's competitive position when compared to the likes of the US accounting-software giant Intuit Inc. and New Zealand's Xero FPO NZX (ASX: XRO).
But Reckon still has a pretty sizeable customer base that has yet to make the transition from desk-top accounting to the cloud.
Given the growth in the cloud accounting space, it's not necessarily a given that if Reckon isn't a number 1 or 2 in the market then it's all over for them. I actually anticipate that Reckon will do quite nicely in the years ahead as it continues to move towards a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pricing model for its accounting software.
Priced at 16 times earnings and with an unfranked dividend of 3.1%, its valuation doesn't seem too demanding. I actually think the market is overly pessimistic on the company's prospects and for long-term investors, there's the opportunity.
IPH Ltd (ASX: IPH)
An intellectual property services company, IPH provides services that help its clients commercialise, protect, enforce, and manage its intellectual property.
Focused mainly on Asia and the Pacific, it's a fast-growing company with a reasonable valuation now that the company's stock has fallen from $9.43 to under $6 today.
Again, for any young investor with time on their side, IPH looks to be a sound investment.
Foolish takeaway
So, why aren't we all looking out for our kids and starting a savings and investments plan?
Naturally, the cost of living does tend to get in the way, but unless you have no disposable income, then I'm hoping that some of you out there reading this can make a decision to sacrifice some potentially unnecessary spending in your life and instead lay down some capital for your kids.
If you can afford to do so, saving and investing with a long time horizon (which your kids have) means that you may provide them the opportunities later in life that can be only dreamt about today.
The side benefit to this is that your kids become engaged with the process, learn more about money and the economy, and become financially-savvy as they grow older.
Win-win? You bet.
