Fair Share Partners is an Irish social enterprise whose aim is to help young people to achieve financial security and prosperity by consistently saving and investing throughout their lives.
We have a charitable giving program that is designed to encourage users of our website, and in particular parents of young children, to make the decision to invest today to prosper tomorrow, and in so doing, also help us to support their local school via annual charitable donations.
At Fair Share Partners we believe that one reason for the level of wealth inequality today is because many households and individuals don’t invest in or only have minimal investments in financial assets such as the stock market. We would like to see today’s young people safely accumulate their fair share of this slice of the global wealth pie during their working lives.
Towards this end, we especially hope to raise awareness and build confidence among parents as to the benefits of investing in the stock market throughout one’s life and to get their children involved from an early age before they too start working.
One way we try to build confidence is with our calculator where we try to dispel some of the fear and uncertainty surrounding investing in the stock market. Using over 100 years of data on how stock market investments have performed in the past, our calculator provides members with estimated odds of achieving their financial goals by a future date if they decide to invest their savings in the stock market today.
Our simple philosophy is learning through observation and doing. Visitors to our website will be able to follow our Buy & Hold investment approach over time and when they are comfortable doing so, they may then choose to copy the approach themselves. Regardless of how much or how little money you have to invest, the investment lessons that can be learned will be the same, regardless of the sums of money involved.
It’s worth remembering though, that even a relatively small sum such as €100, if invested using the Buy & Hold approach the day someone was born, could be worth in the region of €10,000, or 100 times as much, by the time they reach their 65th birthday. So given enough time, little acorns can grow into mighty oaks!
We especially hope that visitors’ children, having followed the Buy & Hold approach for years beforehand, will have gained sufficient confidence to continue saving and investing in the stock market as soon as they start working, preferably through a tax-efficient workplace retirement savings account.
At Fair Share Partners we’re concerned that today’s young people might not enjoy the same quality of life in retirement that their parents did given that they will likely live longer than their parents and because they probably won’t have access to the relatively more secure pensions that their parents did.
We also have concerns about the gender pension gap whereby an unequal situation exists between men and women with respect to their retirement incomes. We believe one of the best solutions for young women, and young men, is to start saving enough from a young enough age and to invest those savings over the long-term in the stock market.
Ultimately it is our ambition that young people today don’t miss out on simple wealth accumulation opportunities through either a lack of awareness or a lack of action, and that they avail of the one huge advantage they have, that is, time.