What Happens When You Pay Yourself Before Your Bills

When I was in remedial math at 16, we had a guest speaker from a local bank talk to us about the magic of compound interest.

It occurred to me later that the teacher wanted to be there about as much as we did. When you aren’t in smart people math, it’s a safe bet that you aren’t too excited about the subject. Shades of “when am I ever going to use this in the real world!?” Another time she invited a cop in to speak to us who ended up spending 45 minutes discussing how much fun it is to taze people. (Cue lifelong mistrust. I mean if that’s the guy they send out as public liaison, imagine the feelings of the rest of them.)

In any case, at least for me, the magic of compound interest became an excellent reason to focus on math.

The banker explained (without a sales pitch at the end, imagine that!) that once you turn 16, you can start a Roth IRA without your parent’s consent. Then he proceeded to show figures of conservative projections if you funded it from only the money from a summer job until you retired, how much cash you’d have.

Money, turning into more money without any effort from me, sounded like a pretty good plan at 16 when my life goals were reading books and figuring out why I wasn’t cool — never did figure out that second part.