Most people never learned investing at home, and it's costing them years of growth
As seen on the 24/7 Wall St. homepage on October 25, 2026.
I’m 39 (Filipino) and last year I told my 72 year old dad that I’ve been investing the last several years, and his response was: “Oh the stock market? Oh yeah, I knew a family friend that tried doing that back in the day” So no, I was raised all my life not knowing what investing was.
254 comments and almost none say they learned investing at home, which is why so many people hold a 401(k) for years without knowing how it works. The cost of that gap is years of compounding.
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A post by user Babyloniansquire on r/personalfinance asked a simple question: did your parents teach you about retirement and investing, or did you figure it out somewhere else? The post drew 254 comments, and the answer that kept surfacing was the same: almost nobody learned it at home.
The post author is a millennial whose parents were engaged with their own retirement assets but never explained any of it to their child. A friend in her thirties, the author notes, had held a 401(k) for years without understanding how it worked, the dominant pattern in the thread.
The top comment, from SrGeraltoRivera, illustrates how wide the gap can run across generations and cultures. At 39, they told their 72-year-old father about years of investing, and the father's entire frame of reference was a family friend who once tried the stock market decades ago. The concept had simply never been part of the household.
Other commenters described parents who actively warned them away from stocks, calling the market gambling, or who measured financial security entirely through homeownership and paying off a mortgage as fast as possible. A few found their way through books, podcasts, or this subreddit itself, sometimes not until their thirties or forties.
The practical cost the commentary flags is compounding time lost. Someone who holds a 401(k) for years without understanding contribution levels, fund choices, or employer matching is leaving returns on the table every month that delay continues.