What got me into investing? Well I am not exactly sure how old I was, but I know I was in Math class and learning about exponentiation, pretty sure it was still in grade school. Anyway as usual my mind began to wander and I probably was not paying attention to the task at hand anymore, but for some reason I decided to think of exponentiation in terms of money. Again I have no idea why because investing was not something I had ever discussed with anyone before and money really was not an important part of my life at that point. Anyway I took my calculator and punched in a sum of money, something like a 6% rate of return, for 40 years. I couldn’t believe my eyes!! How could such a small amount of money grow into such a large sum, without having to do anything . Well I continued on punching in bigger initial investments, higher rates of returns, over even longer periods of time and soon came the conclusion that if I could somehow find a way to get some bank or something to give me like 5 or 6% return over my lifetime I would be very wealthy. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t do this and why people didn’t just bite the bullet and put a bunch of money away for the next generation or the generation after that. I mean the number coming out of my calculator for compounding money over 100 years was amazing!!

Well this was really the start for me. Had I been home sick or day dreaming about what video game I was going to play when I got home I probably would have never gotten into investing.

While I never forgot about compounding, I guess I never thought I could take advantage of it until I was an adult and had a full time job so that I could then find some magical vehicle to give me a good rate of return on my money. Afterall I really thought 6% was a great return and if I could just lock something like that in when I was older, man would I be rich.

I had it all planned out too. The first 5 years or so that I got a job I was going to live like a pauper and invest as much as I could. I figured If I could live the first 20 years or so of my life without making any significant money, why not extend it for a few more years once I got a job and use those resources for investing.

Well as 7th or 8th grader this was my plan.