Back to Index

2024-05-30_Highest_Paying_Summer_Job_for_Teens


Transcript

Who's your Realtor? Seriously, who is your Realtor? Lately, there's been a lot in the news about real estate and Realtors. So let us help clear the air. California Realtors are Californians just like you, your neighbor, your best friend's brother, and your kid's baseball coach. And we all strive every day to be your trusted advisors on the biggest financial decision of your life.

No one cares more about helping Californians live the California Dream than California Realtors. Because we know California real estate is not easy. That's an understatement. But if you're a first-timer, we help you confidently get in the game. And if you've been there, done that, we're there to help you get through what's new and different.

We tirelessly negotiate so you don't have to. And we help you get past all the tough stuff and on to the good stuff. Not because it's our job, but because it's your dream. Let's go to work. California Association of Realtors. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Today on the podcast, I would like to give some advice to teenagers and parents of teenagers related to a summer job.

And in today's podcast, I am going to tell you what I believe is the highest-paying summer job that is available for teens. This summer job will make you far more than minimum wage. It could pretty easily make you 10x minimum wage. It possibly could make you as much as a few hundred dollars per hour.

And I am not exaggerating. That job, very simply, is to apply for scholarships, especially college scholarships. Some months back, a friend of mine who has many teenagers wrote to me and said, "Joshua, how can I teach my teens to make money? What's the best way for my teens to make money?" And I've been thinking about this for quite a long time.

And obviously, there are many things that a teenager can do to make money. And in fact, I'm very grateful that there are more things today that a teenager can do to make money more than ever before in human history. Now, this particular friend of mine lives in Europe, and there's not a place where, in the town where she lives, it's unlikely that her children will be able to get kind of the standard American-style summer job.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't employment opportunities. There's always opportunities for a job. But I think, don't we want a little bit more? Wouldn't we like to make a little bit more money? And so you go to things like self-employment or business. Well, one of the nice things about the Internet Revolution is that if a teenager is able to develop the skills that the market values, then that teenager can access a global job market.

And because of being able to be hidden behind a computer screen, oftentimes the teenager can surpass the standard built-in age discrimination that teens face in the workplace and earn good money. However, as I've thought about that-- and by the way, I'll talk more about that in the future-- as I've thought about that, I've always been struck by this balance.

And the balance is simply how many teens are actually going to be able to do that stuff. We celebrate enormously successful teen entrepreneurs, rightly, because it's very unusual. And while all of us think that, of course, our children are absolutely number one, we have to acknowledge the fact that, many times, teens don't have these skills, and it's difficult to develop them.

That's not to say that we shouldn't be giving them good coaching to help and develop those skills, but all of the alternative radical ideas related to making money as a teenager require some pretty ambitious teens and pretty ambitious parents. Now, it's my aspiration to raise such ambitious teens, and I hope that you also have that ambition.

But as I've thought about it, I think there is a simpler path. And the path doesn't sound very radical when I talk about it, because guess what it is? Do well in school, go to college, get advanced degrees if possible, and get great jobs that start great careers. It doesn't sound all that unique, because, after all, that's the standard advice.

But just because it's the standard advice doesn't mean that it's wrong. In fact, in this case, I think it is good advice. I've pondered this for years. I've pondered how much do we encourage entrepreneurial endeavors, how much do we do that as compared to academics. And I'm pretty well persuaded that academics should be the primary job for most of our young people.

Students who are skilled with academics should focus intensively on those academics, and they should focus as intensively as possible on mastering that system. Teens should focus on getting straight A's. Teens should develop study skills so that they can do well in class and get top grades without actually working all that hard.

They should put hours and hours and hours into preparation for important exams, such as PSAT and SAT and ACT and AP exams and CLEP exams and A-levels and the Abitur and all of the various baccalaureate, the baccirato, all the European things as well, if you're a European listener. You should do all of them.

And those are really, really important. Those are really, really important for you to focus your time and your attention on. That system is not broken. That system is working very, very well today. Students who are capable of high academics and who are motivated for high academics should be focusing on that system.

And I do not think that from a purely financial perspective, I do not think that there is any after-school job that is going to be superior in high school to doing well in academics. Now, I'm going to focus today's podcast on the topic of scholarships, but I'd like to talk for a few hours about all the things that you can add to that, all the things you can do in high school, all of the internships you can take, all of the unpaid work, all of the volunteering, and how even that stuff really pays off.

My point here is just to say that that system works really, really well. And I fear that in the current strong swing against college, I fear that we've swung very far the other way. And I fear that we're going to spend more time telling students, "You've got to focus on building a business," instead of helping them to succeed within the academic environment and context.

Here's how I see it pretty simply. If you are capable of getting good grades or if you're capable of doing well on exams, either by dint of your natural intellectual ability or your absolute work ethic, that should be your primary focus. That should be your major area of focus.

Do entrepreneurship if you're interested, but don't think that that's a magic path to wealth. It may work out well, and you can always do entrepreneurship, and you can do entrepreneurship alongside your academics. It's valuable, but don't neglect focus on academics. Why don't people see the value of focusing on academics?

One big reason, which is what I'm focusing on today, is that they think the payoff is many, many years in the future. They think that the payoff is, "Well, after I finish high school and after I go to college and after I pay $150,000 for a college degree, then I'll finally start to make some money, and maybe I can have my student loans paid off by the time I'm 30." Well, this is nonsense.

This is ignorant nonsense. Your focus on academics can pay off very, very quickly, possibly in as few as two or three or four years, depending on your age, if you know what you're doing and you're paying attention to life. Now, unfortunately, most of us, when we are teens, we are ignorant.

I was ignorant, totally ignorant in high school, totally ignorant in college. I never even imagined that there were people out there who could give me good advice. I have a friend of mine who is a professional guidance counselor at an elite international private school, and his entire career is helping the children of elite parents to go and fulfill their dreams and be placed into a college environment that is a good fit for them.

Not a single time in high school did I meet with my guidance counselor. I knew the guy's name, but I never had a clue. No one explained to me what a guidance counselor was, what a guidance counselor did. I didn't even imagine that there were resources out there that could help me.

I didn't have a clue. When I went to college, I didn't engage in any strategic planning. I took an SAT exam. I never studied for an SAT exam. I just took it. I got a score. I assumed that that was the point of the test. I didn't know you could study for the SAT exam.

I didn't know you could take prep classes. I didn't know you could take prep books. No one sat me down and explained to me how crucial this number was. I never had a clue. I just went, took the exam, got a score, figured, "All right, now that's done." I never took the ACT.

I never tried for much of anything else. I took a few AP exams because I thought it would be fun, but no one coached me on actually preparing for the AP exams. I didn't know how to study. I just kind of naturally did okay and passed most of them and failed a few of them and kind of went on with my life.

When I went to college, I applied to exactly one college, and I applied for exactly one extra scholarship simply because my siblings had all gotten the scholarship. I didn't know you could go and apply for many scholarships, so I got a little bit of merit-based aid from my university.

I got a Florida Bright Futures scholarship based upon my GPA, and I got a Kiwanis scholarship because all of my siblings had all gotten a Kiwanis scholarship, and so I knew to apply for that. I never even dreamed that I could go and apply for more scholarships, and so I trotted off to school, and with the owed money, started borrowing money on student loans, and I just assumed that was the way it was.

I was entirely ignorant of all of the world of money that could be thrown at me if I just exercised a little bit of attention and a little bit of initiative, and I desperately wish I had figured it out that I'd gotten coaching. I don't blame anybody. I don't blame anybody but myself, but I was too dumb to go and ask questions.

So what I want to explain to you, either the teen or aspiring teen or parent of a teen today, is how wrong that thinking is, and I want to tell you why studying for school, taking exams, doing exam prep, applying for scholarships is probably the best-paying work that you can possibly do.

Now, let me defend quickly the point I made about you don't have to wait for many years. Here's the math of college. When people look at college, especially today in which it has now become very popular to gripe about college and to say it's not worth it, the whole system is broken, it's not worth it, and it's too expensive, what if college were free?

What if college were entirely free? Even better, what if you got paid to go to college? Would that change the math? Would that change the calculus? And here I mean calculus in the sense that your own calculations of cost versus value. This is the missing point that people do not understand when it comes to college.

I would be very slow to encourage someone to go to college if the cost of college was to go out and spend $150,000 and borrow it on student loans to go and get a mediocre degree from a mediocre college. In that specific circumstance, I'm going to be on the anti-college bandwagon for that student.

Instead of that, I'm going to go and encourage the student to go and get a quick, fast, and easy degree online so you can just check the box that I've got a college degree, and I'm going to focus on getting into a career, getting into work, and just getting the degree fast, easy, and cheap.

I'm not going to go deep into college financing, but the idea that college today is expensive is absurd. College is only expensive at universities that publish their rates as expensive private universities, and it's only expensive if you don't get any financial aid. And yet, in the way the U.S.

system works, they throw financial aid money at you if you're intelligent and get good grades and a little bit accomplished, even if you are dedicated to understanding the system. Ironically, I have an outline somewhere in my notes for a show that I had planned to do. I'll just give you the teaser of it.

Did you know that the rate of-- in which Scandinavia? I think it was Sweden-- that in one of the Scandinavian countries, which has a lot of social welfare, in which tuition is entirely free, did you know that-- I think it's Sweden-- has some of the highest rates of student loan balances, even though the college itself is free, without tuition, for everybody?

It's astonishing. Whereas in the United States, there's so much money available for you, not only with regard to scholarships and financial aid, real financial aid, not loans, but in all kinds of grants and fellowships and things that are available to you, but even just in terms of the low cost.

Let me stay on track. The point is, back to the $150,000 school. Now let's change it. Let's assume that I tell you you can go to a college and the college or some benefactor is going to pay the full cost of $150,000 for you. That $150,000 is going to cover all your tuition, all of your room and board, all of your expenses, your books, everything for you.

And all you got to do is go to college and get good grades. Well, now everything changes because the normal course load in a university is laughably easy. Full-time is considered to be 12 to 18 credit hours per week over the course of two academic semesters per year. Let's say you're taking a full course load of 18 hours per week.

Now, my engineering students and my mathematics students and somebody, maybe the physics student, something like that, will quickly know that yes, you do actually have to do homework. I never even dreamed of doing an hour of homework for every hour of class, even though I probably should have. I never did that.

Not a single time did I ever do an hour of homework for an hour of class. So, but let's say that you do. Let's say that you're going to do an hour of homework for every hour of class. You're up to 36 hours a week of obligation. Let's say that you are an engineering student or a physics student, and now you're going to do two hours of homework reliably and consistently for every one hour of class, and you're going to take 18 credit hours.

Guess what your obligation is? 54 hours a week. 54 hours a week, that's it. And you're living in a place where you walk to class, you walk back to your dorm room. That is the easiest life anybody can imagine. You have another 60 hours a week available to you that you could do anything you want.

There's nothing you can't do when you're in college, even if you're taking a full load. So all of the things that people alternatively say, they say, "Well, you know what? I shouldn't go to college because I want to start a business." Guess what? Go start the business. Let someone pay for your college degree.

Go start the business. Or they say, "I've got to work." You can work. My senior year of college is about the only year of college that I'm actually proud of. I took 19 hours of class, both semesters, senior capstone courses. I worked 40 hours a week at a job I had to commute to.

I got straight A's, and I still had plenty of time for fun and travel. It worked fine. So you can work a 40-hour job. You don't have to choose is the point. This is what's fallacious about everyone who argues about, "Should I go to college or should I not go to college?" So if you're the kind of person who is college-bound based upon either you can do academics or you can hustle and learn to do academics, you should go to college, especially if you can get people to pay for it.

So how do you get people to pay for it? Well, you sit down and you start figuring out how the system works. And the secret to the system is a couple-fold. I'm doing a very focused podcast here. I probably should teach a 20-hour class on it. But the basic idea is you need to highly qualify yourself on the metrics that people are looking for for qualifications and then market yourself to all of the people who are looking for qualified people like you.

Now, there's a little bit of distinction that we need to make because the kinds of things that a student should do to qualify himself, for example, to get into an elite university are often different than the kinds of things that a student should do to qualify himself for getting a great scholarship.

So I'm not talking today about admission to an elite university. Here's what I never understood, though, when I was young. I remember one time I was briefly-- I was taking a class in college, and someone told me about a Harvard MBA and how prestigious it was. And I thought for a moment, "Hey, that'd be pretty cool.

"Wouldn't it be fun to go and do something prestigious "like apply to Harvard?" So first thing I did was pulled up the tuition schedule for the Harvard MBA program, and actually at one point I actually toured the campus. I was in Boston for a business trip of some kind, and I toured the campus.

And I thought, "Hey, that'd be pretty cool." But the first thing I did was saw the tuition, and I immediately assumed, "Well, I can't afford that. "I can't do it." I didn't have any understanding of how financial aid works for colleges. So if you're interested in going into an elite university, what you need to know is that elite universities have about a bazillion dollars in their funds, in their endowment funds, and if you can get accepted to an elite university, regardless of your financial situation, you're going to be able to go.

I'm not sure that's always the right move, but just know that if you can get accepted to an elite university, you're going to be able to go. But there are many other paths, and if you want to go to college and not pay for it, you absolutely can make it happen.

You may not be able to do it at an elite university, but you can certainly do it at a high-quality university, because if your academic credentials are sufficient, you can get a merit-based full ride. And a full ride, or even a full tuition, just to clarify the terms, a full tuition means they'll pay all your tuition costs, but you're still responsible for room and board and books and fees, or a full ride, in which case they'll pay for your tuition and your room and board and your books and your fees.

So these are available. Full rides are available for an undergraduate degree. Full rides are available for a graduate degree. Full rides are available for law school. Full rides are available for medical school. It's available if you are a great student. And I'm convinced that anybody who has any ambition to do something like that can become a great student, because study skills, learning skills, they're just skills that can be learned in practice, and you can become a very effective learner.

And you can choose a major or something that's appropriate for you. I'm not saying everyone can be a quantum physicist, just that you can find something that's appropriate for you, and you can get a full ride based upon your academic qualifications. So spending extra time on the weekend studying for school is the right thing to do.

If you want to know the right thing to do, find an Asian friend, go and ask their parents what they think you should do, and do what their parents tell you to do. There's a great Asian stereotype for a reason about their parents making sure their children do well in school.

Just do it, and you'll open up a whole world of access to great merit-based scholarships. However, that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to scholarships. There are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of scholarships that you can apply for. Here's what I never understood when I was in high school that I desperately wish I had.

Applying for scholarships is pretty easy. It doesn't take that much time. All you got to do is find a scholarship that you might in some way qualify for or might be relevant for you in some possible way. Usually you got to sit down and fill out an application, and then usually you need to do something like write an essay or demonstrate your qualification for the scholarship.

Now there's some pretty amazing scholarships that will cover you for all of your tuition. There's scholarships out there that will pay for everything from an undergraduate degree all the way through a PhD, 100%. You're going to have to hustle for years to do those things. But all the things you do to ultimately get those scholarships are all the things you should be doing, period, to gain acceptance to an elite university, to get merit-based scholarships.

It's all just the standard stuff of being a highly motivated, success-oriented teenager. And all it requires is a little bit of motivation for you to do it. And the whole world is wanting to coach you and wanting to help you as soon as you demonstrate a little bit of initiative if you're a teen.

There are also tons and tons of smaller scholarships that all you got to do is you don't have to go and start some world-changing project to end hunger and homelessness in your area. All you got to do is write an essay. What I never understood was the math of this.

And it wasn't until I was about a senior in college that I finally sat down and realized what it was like. I mentioned the scholarships that I got when I was in college, one of them being a Kiwanis scholarship. And this was a local Kiwanis club where I was from, and they gave out a very simple scholarship.

The application for the scholarship was simply an application that you made. You submitted your grades and other qualifications. I don't remember now at this point. I remember going for an interview, a simple interview with the team, and I was granted the scholarship. The scholarship was fairly modest. I don't remember if it was $500 a semester or $1,000 a semester, but it was something like that.

Let's call it $500 and be a little bit more modest. It was a $500 scholarship. And so every fall and every spring, I and my parents would go to the Kiwanis scholarship luncheon. And it got to be really great because I didn't make any use of it at all.

But I got to know some interesting people who were leaders in the community, members of the Kiwanis club. I got to know and appreciate some of the people. There's so much more I could have done. When I coach college students, I just want to grab them and shake them and say, "Don't be as dumb as I was.

"This is your chance," and teach them how to network with people. Anyway, I was dumb. But I would go to this, and they would bring me up, and they would give me the $500 check. They would feed us a nice lunch, and we would see all the other scholarship recipients.

It was great. It wasn't until the end of college that I sat down and I tried to figure out how much money did I actually get from Kiwanis? And the answer, if it was $500 per semester, the answer, do the math, eight semesters, $4,000. That was how much money I got from the Kiwanis club, $4,000.

And all I had to do was fill in an application. It probably took 30, 60 minutes. Go to a single interview. It took not much time at all. And then they fed me lunch and handed me $500 each semester, $4,000. What was my hourly rate for that Kiwanis scholarship that I got?

Let's assume, let's ignore the free lunches. There's no such thing as a free lunch, but sometimes there is if you get your grades right. So let's say I had three hours, four hours into it. My hourly rate was easily $1,000 an hour. $1,000 an hour I got paid for filling out an application for a Kiwanis club scholarship in my local area.

That's a pretty normal thing in the world of scholarships. I remember when I became aware of scholarships, I would see sometimes the low value, a $250 scholarship, a $400 scholarship, and I just dismissed it as being pointless. What I didn't understand was it was a $250 per semester scholarship.

A $1,000 scholarship in many cases is $1,000 per year or $1,000 per semester. And so if you're looking for a high-paying summer job, dear high school sophomore, dear high school junior, probably dear high school freshman, senior, yeah, you should still be doing it, starting when you're a freshman, you're a sophomore, and you're a junior.

I am convinced the highest-paying summer job that you could possibly do is applying for scholarships. Let's assume that you can apply for scholarships and let's assume that you can get one out of four, 25% success ratio. From my research in the world of scholarships, for a reasonably qualified student, decent grades, decent test scores, good reputation, good involvement, a little bit of community service, those kinds of things, I don't think that would be an unreasonable expectation that you might get one out of four or one out of five of the scholarships that you apply for.

So let's assume that it takes you on average about three or four hours per scholarship. I think that's pretty excessive, but I want to be very fair. Once you have a system for organizing yourself, I think many scholarship applications might take you an hour or two. The key thing that's going to take a while is often going to be writing an essay.

So your goal should be to get very good at writing essays very, very quickly and write a custom essay for each individual scholarship. Let's assume that it takes you an hour to write an essay of a page or two, maybe two hours. So again, four hours per, let's do three, three hours per.

So you apply for four different scholarships, four different $1,000 scholarships, and you get one of the four. It's $1,000 a year usually for a small scholarship, and all you got to do once you've gotten it is do like what I did is show back up to the Kiwanis Club luncheon, and there may have been an annual kind of check-in with me.

Forgive me, it's been a while now. But the requirements to maintain the scholarship are pretty low. So it takes you three hours per scholarship application times four for a total of 12 hours of work, and you get one $4,000 scholarship that's worth $4,000 over the course of four years.

What's your hourly rate? 4,000 divided by 12, $333 per hour. But wait, there's more. Scholarship money, when it's used to pay for tuition, is tax-free. So it's even better than, you know, what would you have to pay for that to go out and work in order to earn the $333 per hour?

Where are you going to make $333 per hour consistently? And then what would you have to do to go out and actually make it post-tax? The numbers are beautiful when you start digging into them. They're fantastic. So the question is how many scholarship applications could you make if you were really motivated?

Here's another little thing that I never knew. I never knew that there's no limit as to how many scholarships you can win. I knew this a little bit because I had a sister who got really good grades, and she got a high-merit scholarship from her university, and so she got paid to go to university.

But it wasn't very much. It was some thousands of dollars. It wasn't tens of thousands of dollars per year. It wasn't until later I realized that a motivated, dedicated student could pretty easily hack this system and be paid tens of thousands of dollars per year to go to college.

Now imagine--back to that college discussion that I said-- imagine that you did well with academics, so you were qualified in order to get into a college that you wanted to go to, and imagine that all of your expenses are covered by your scholarships, all of your tuition payments, all of your own board, your books, your class fees--everything's covered.

And in addition to that, you've got $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a year of pocket money that's coming in from 15 or 17 different scholarships that you have won. What could college do for you in that circumstance? All you've got to do is stay in good standing with your college, go to class, get good grades.

You should get good grades in college. Go to class, get good grades. But you still have all the rest of the time available for you. And you're being paid a couple thousand dollars a month, plus all of your expenses paid, for doing that. Now what could you build, knowing that you're in college and you're getting a college degree, but you also have time to build your business, make connections.

Think of the internships, the unpaid internships you could get. Think of the programs you could go on, the study abroad programs and all the different things you could do. Now it completely changes the calculus of the college decision. So what's necessary to do that? Well, first of all, you have to be capable of doing the work in the academic environment.

And I promise you, you are capable. If you're getting bad grades right now, it's probably just because you don't care and you don't understand how much of a difference this could make for you. It's also probably because you've never taken any training on how to study, how to learn effectively.

It's the dumbest thing in the world that will put students through a 12-year academic gauntlet and only rarely will there be a caring teacher who will give them a class on some useful study technique. And the world of learning science has completely changed. The work that's been done over the last 20 years is outstanding.

So dig into the world of learning science. Grab a book on how to learn. Go to the library. Take a course on how to learn. There's all kinds of stuff. There's great YouTube channels out there. My favorites are Benjamin Keepe, who has a YouTube channel on it, and Justin Sung is one of the biggest ones.

So go to YouTube, put in Benjamin Keepe, K-E-E-P, and Justin Sung, and let the algorithm feed you that kind of stuff, and learn how to study, learn how to learn, learn how to learn efficiently so that you can get more work done in less time. Then think about the stuff you're going to be involved in.

Doing well with academics is not sufficient for you to get into great colleges and get other things. There's more to it. But the point is, go after it. And if you're not currently doing it, start caring and doing it. Then you need to just simply put in place a system where you're going to handle all the stuff well.

You're going to do well academically. You're going to do well with your test scores, and you need to start collecting and build a system for applying for scholarships. If you're coaching people who are younger, younger than, say, ninth grade-- by the way, I think a good time to start this kind of discussion, obviously parents have to make the decision based on what their child can handle.

I don't want to create a meat grinder of a system where we just yell at people all the time, and you've got to do this, you've got to do this. I think there's benefit to childhood. But one of the things that you should focus on with students who are younger is get them accustomed to the work.

So I've got a 10-year-old, and one of the things I'm really focusing on is building all of the core skills. In the early years, it's really important that you build strong academics. I've talked about that extensively elsewhere. You need to have great readers, people who read all the time, because that's one of the most important ways to do that.

You need to be really good at math, so you should be doing math every single day with a great math curriculum, constantly, every single day, building those math skills. And then writing. Writing is a fundamental skill. So it needs to be fairly easy and simple for a student to sit down and bang out an essay.

And that's just a skill that can be built. High school students sit there and stare at a blank screen and can't bang out an essay in 90 minutes because they're not trained on it and they're not practiced on it. So get a great writing curriculum and get them banging out essays every day.

And when you get to the point where you can churn out essays, then it's going to be pretty simple. I heard an idea recently. I was listening to a scholarship advisor talk about this, and she said she had a friend of hers who would pay – he would pay his children very young, before high school, I think late elementary school and middle school.

He had a system where he would pay his children $5 for every scholarship application that they made. And he didn't care whether they were even eligible. He didn't care whether they were able to do it. He just paid them for making the application. And his point was that by starting in seventh grade, and now he's paid them $5 per scholarship application, he's got them lined up so that when they're eligible at ninth grade, not only do they have a bunch of essays that they've thought through for all these scholarships they've applied to and, of course, not gotten over the years, but now he can start pooling from them and say, "All right, let's grab this essay that you wrote previously.

Let's polish it up." And they're all ready to start actually making those applications. And I thought, "Brilliant. Brilliant. I'm going to do it." I don't know if $5 is the right number, but it sounds pretty good. You know, get a student used to doing two or three applications a day, and you've got an amazingly productive thing to do.

Now, scholarships are not the only thing. So back to the comment I made where I said this could pay off in a couple of years. One of the things that people ignore is they ignore all the things that can be done during high school, all of the youth congresses and the study abroad programs.

I was going through a bunch of stuff this past week looking at all the programs the U.S. government does. The U.S. government will pay for all of your expenses, all your expenses to go and study abroad for a year, go to Germany, take a year of school in Germany or in Georgia or in many places.

There's all these youth congresses and all these things. I never even imagined applying for any of that stuff. I don't know why I didn't. I was dumb. Don't be like me. I just never thought that was my thing. I didn't see myself as the kind of person who could do that stuff or who would do that stuff, and I'd never want to set the example for me.

And so if you're coaching your child, obviously you know what your child needs, but this stuff's available to you. It's all out there. And that stuff can be paying off even just during high school, where you can do it pretty early, and it just builds your story. It builds the whole package.

So I beg you, don't be dumb like me. Don't think that, "Oh, I just have to sit back here, and the only pathway to my dreams is for me to work and earn money." No, it's not true. There are many pathways, and there are rich people, mega billionaires, who have created all kinds of charitable foundations to throw money at you.

And all you've got to do is qualify yourself for that, and then expose yourself to it by making the applications. I'm not going to go into any more technical details. I just want you to know, if you're a teenager, or if you're coming up on your teenage years, and/or if you're coaching a teenager in some way, shape, or form, your teens can reliably and consistently earn more than $100 an hour through this system, and in some cases, much more than $100 an hour.

There is no higher-paying job or opportunity that is as consistent and effective for a motivated, organized, and disciplined teenager than getting good grades, getting good test scores, getting on the pathway into college based upon acceptance, extracurriculars, community service, community involvement, having one thing that you're really into that tells your story effectively, and applying for lots of scholarships.

There's no reason why the kind of student who should be going to college from an academic perspective shouldn't be paid to go to college in our current system. Do it. There's lots of people out there-- sorry, there's some people out there who've done it. You can do it, too.

It will pay off in the long run. If I went over my list of the stuff you could do with those four college years, given the numbers that I described to you of what's possible to you just of college being paid for and all you got to do is get good grades, it's astonishing what you could accomplish during that phase of your life.

But it starts in your teens. It's summertime. This is the right summer job for you to be focused on now. Mercedes-Benz Certified Pre-Owned Vehicles. Stunning looks, state-of-the-art intelligence, and a rigorous inspection process so you can make your dream car a reality. Learn more at mbusa.com/cpo and drive off in the car of your dreams today.