Who needs to fight Black Friday crowds when you can sit at home in your armchair, enjoying a day with the family? Better yet, how about a day helping your friends prepare to become wealthy while you’re at home in your armchair? This list is for you. While not every gift here will make you or your friends instant millionaires, each of these can warm the recipient’s heart and help them start filling their wallet.
[See: 12 Ways to Be a More Mindful Spender.]
1. For the fun-lover, buy a board game. What’s more fun than a game with friends? How about a game about finance or business. While most crowds find games boring if they’re designed to teach, several titles can both be entertaining and build your thirst for business or finance.
For stock market fun, try Stockpile, a relatively easy game in which everyone is handed a little secret insider information. Or try Acquire, a more advanced game about controlling companies and forcing mergers. For a party crowd, check out Pit, a card game replicating the old days of commodities traders yelling at each other. Or look for Funemployed, where everyone takes turns in human resources as a hiring manager or interviewee. You may not learn much about grabbing that new corner office job, but you’ll have fun talking business and stocks all night.
[See: 7 Ways to Avoid Financial Stress Over the Holidays.]
2. For the reader, buy a book. Who wouldn’t like a great financial planning book? While some of the horrible titles available can help you sleep, the best books will hold your friend’s interest for hours.
Just starting out? Dave Ramsey’s “The Total Money Makeover” is a great place to start. If your friend is interested in financial planning, buy them Ric Edelman’s “The Truth About Money.” Building a stock portfolio? Peter Lynch’s “Beating the Street” or Benjamin Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor” are classics. Hoping to buy real estate? You can’t beat Robert Kiyosaki’s primer, “Rich Dad Poor Dad” or BiggerPockets’ “The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Real Estate Investing.”
[See: 9 Ways to Save When Holiday Shopping With Credit Cards.]
3. For kids, try the variety approach. Shopping for kids is both easy and difficult. While a young child even enjoys the box as much as the gift, many kids will still appreciate anything you give them. Unless you’re the parent, though, you don’t know their readiness level with money.
Check out some of the innovative piggy banks available. Many will track your cash. Some act as robots or popular television or movie characters. Others still will perform tricks whenever kids save money. Check out Monopoly Junior and The Game of Life for older kids. Start a 529 college savings plan or gift to an already established plan. Want to teach basic money management skills? Gift the whole family a tool called FamZoo, an online and credit card system where all the accounts are linked together, and parents can not only reward kids for chores completed but also teach basic interest and penalty concepts.
4. For the techie, load their phone with apps. The good news is that many financial apps are free, but you don’t have to tell the recipient that.
Trying to build a saving habit? Check out Tip Yourself or Digit. While Tip Yourself allows you to reward yourself like you’d tip a waiter, Digit will save automatically on your behalf. Building a portfolio? DIY.Fund has been developed by two former Wall Streeters who want to bring heavy-duty portfolio tools to your house (and make them easy to understand). M1 Finance is designed to manage your portfolio in multiple pie charts, so you don’t get too heavily invested in one stock or sector. For deeper dives into individual stocks, Kavout is a machine learning tool that helps you analyze and pick better stocks.
5. For the person who just wants to start, buy investments. While all of the gifts above can whet your friend’s appetite, the gift of actual investments will often be the push people need to just get started down the path to successful investing. Because they actually own some investments, they’ll then hopefully take the steps to learn about building a better portfolio.
Want to give a small amount of mutual funds or stocks? Check out Stockpile, where you can easily gift fractional shares. Instead of waiting until you have enough for 10 or 100 shares, Stockpile makes it easy to gift as little as $25. Hoping to teach planning and working toward goals? Try iSow, which in 90 seconds helps users create a profile and then begin a journey toward building funds for things that matter to them. There’s no more giving the wrong gift if they picked it themselves.
Gift giving this way is easy, rewarding and fun. Better yet, you won’t fight the crowds getting to most of these gifts.
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5 Holiday Gifts to Help Your Friends Become Wealthy originally appeared on usnews.com
