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It’s that time of year. School sessions have ended. The doldrums of summer have begun. Teenagers are likely ready to make some cash. The summer months offer the best way for young adults to begin learning about jobs, savings, and making money. But what should you do to earn money? Of course you can visit fast food restaurants and do other types of menial jobs in your community, but maybe you want to be a bit more inventive and try something that’s more of a challenge.

Physical Labor– construction jobs, like roofing, likely need gophers and some help if you’re strong enough. They are really not that hard and can pay really well. The best part is they’re typically only available in the summer. No one re-roofs their home in the cold winter.

Nature Jobs — lawn mowing comes to mind. But if you’re in a fairly large city, the parks department may hire you to plant flowers, trim bushes, and other beautify their parks. It’s a good outdoor job without too much strain. This could include any landscaping job throughout the community. Maybe you help a neighbor with their large garden or lay some brick for a pathway. The biggest hurdle here would be simply marketing yourself. If you know a bunch of people then that would be easy, but maybe you don’t. In that case a flyer posted at the entrance of the neighborhood grocer would work. Or maybe even put a listing on Craigslist.

Entrepreneurial Skills — It’s not everyone that can start selling to neighbors, finding wholesale prices and making a market where one didn’t exist. But maybe you can start a business online doing, selling odds and ends on eBay for a neighbor or doing some other technical job for the less-than-technical friend of a friend? I have a friend who ripped a few hundred CDs to his computer for an acquaintance. I’m sure there’s other technical jobs that teenagers can likely figure out in a short amount of time. Think about it for a while and then put up a flyer with tear-offs.You may be surprised how many people have need to good technical skills.

Summertime held memories of hard work in the heat. Now many teenagers may find their computer skills can take them indoors in the air conditioning. What skills do you have that you could put to use for some extra money this summer?

Today is Father’s Day. To all those fathers out there, have a great one. I hope you spent it with your children and had a great time. It’s quickly becoming my favorite holiday. What’s not to love? I get showered with appreciation, a great meal, and to spend the day doing fatherly activities like grilling or watching a baseball game. As I was reflecting on today’s blog post, I thought it would be great to share the tidbits of information about money that my father passed along to me.

1. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded. My father worked two jobs for as long as I can remember. He also started a construction company when I was a teenager. He always seemed to work from dawn til dusk. It’s a lesson he showed rather than preached about.
2. Always look for bargains. In a tight economy, my father and mother would be clipping coupons at the kitchen table, using them religiously each week at the grocery store. They never forgot their coupon wallet and the savings would add up quickly.
3. Buy quality rather than quantity. My father bought a riding lawnmower when I was eight years old. I’m thirty-two years old now and that mower still cuts the grass. He makes investments in quality products rather than buying a replacements each time it breaks down.
4. Save for the unexpected. We should always have an emergency fund because we never know when the fridge may stop working or your car need new brakes.
5. Plan for the future. Be sure to invest in your own future. Plan for college, a house, a car, and any other activities.

So what has your own father taught you about money, investing, or savings? Do you have a good story to share? Leave it in the comments so we can all learn from the great fathers of the world.

Stock trading has to be one of the most misunderstood practices in all of finance. We hear stories about vast wealth or abysmal failure — sometimes those stories are wrapped in the same person. What we don’t hear are the strategies, practices, and goals. In order to be successful with stock trading, a person needs to do a lot of research and also balance their portfolio across various industry sectors.

The balance a portfolio has will be gained from that portfolio’s stock purchases. My first inclination when I began trading stocks was to buy all technology stocks. They appeared safe to me, because that’s the industry I was most familiar. I knew the Apples, Googles, Microsofts, and Ciscos. I knew nothing of the healthcare, energy, or transportation. So a simple strategy would be to identify the weak sectors of our knowledge and buy one or two long term stocks from reputable companies in those sectors. What are those sectors?

• Healthcare
• Technology
• Financial
• Transportation
• Energy
• Retail Industry
• Communications
• Capital Goods
• Basic Materials

Most stocks would fall under one of the above categories. Knowing the sector a stock falls into should help most of us make informed decisions about that stock. Many of the stock trading companies give us tools to compare across the sector. Using these tools in the sector can help us identify stocks that may be undervalued due to sector-wide bubbles bursting or other factors.

The majority of us will use the sector information to balance our portfolio. If we have too many technology stocks, then we should probably look at one of the sectors to help our portfolio weather a downturn in a particular industry. We all know the hurt that technology stocks felt after the 2000 bubble. We should ensure with our stock purchases that we have a barrier against those types of situations.