Alumni

Making Change

A sociology class leads Larry Lynch ’69 to help others achieve financial success.

By Jeff Kelly Lowenstein

Larry Lynch ’69 felt full and free in the summer of 2000.

After doing “absurdly well” in the stock market, he switched jobs, paid off his mortgage, and purchased a green BMW 530i. But his mood changed one Sunday morning when he saw a man in line at a convenience store. “He got up to the counter, bought a yard and a half of lottery tickets, and didn’t win a thing,” Lynch says. “He took the tickets, wadded them up in a ball, and stalked out.”  

Lynch stifled his impulse to explain mathematical principles to the angry man, but decided instead that he needed to do something to help the man’s children. So he wrote a book.

Help your kids become Millionaire$ (New Haven: Infinity Publishing.Com, 2005) is a practical and accessible work that both covers the basics of financial management and challenges conventional wisdom. Stemming from Lynch’s training in sociology at Lake Forest College, the book embodies his belief that the financial success he has achieved is available to the vast majority of Americans. “There is no reason why 90 percent of kids can’t be wealthy for the rest of their lives,” Lynch says. 

The seeds for the book were sown in the 1960s when Lynch took a sociology class from Mihalyi “Mike” Csikszentmihalyi. Fascinated by the study of social groups, Lynch changed his major to sociology and subsequently looked for an opportunity to apply the ideas he learned in an attempt to change people’s behavior.   

It took three decades and as many careers for that chance to arrive. 

Upon graduating from Lake Forest, Lynch raced motorcycles, produced shows at Boston’s leading radio station, and spent 20 years in the technology industry. After his investing success and the convenience store incident, however, Lynch turned his attention to writing the book. 

The work maintains that creating financial security for children is possible, given a willingness to establish and hold to a budget, a can-do attitude about saving money, and the application of legal mathematical tools.

Specifically, Lynch advocates saving money for a child’s retirement through a Roth IRA and letting compound interest go to work. Parents who put aside $25,000 in a Roth IRA and receive a 10 percent annual return will generate nearly $2,000,000 in tax free income after 50 years, he says. “You can save for 10 years and just forget about it,” Lynch says.

John Dooley, director of Greendale Physical Therapy in Worcester, Massachusetts, praised the book’s clarity. “The thing I liked about it was it was very simple, right to the point, and it had real information,” says Dooley, who had Lynch speak to his staff of nearly 10 employees. Lynch’s presentation prompted him to examine his own finances and engaged his workers, many of whom were skeptics before Lynch’s arrival. “They now know that with even a small amount of yearly savings and your sound principles they can make a million dollars,” Dooley wrote to Lynch in an e-mail.

Children will know that, too, if Lynch has his way. The book emphasizes the importance of children’s financial education that boosts their confidence through a combination of encouragement and space to make their own mistakes.

In addition, Lynch has developed a three-part financial curriculum for middle school students. The founder of Education for Economic Security, Inc., Lynch and other professional money managers have taught the lessons in half a dozen schools in Massachusetts.

Floral Street School in Shrewsbury is one of them. Lynch piloted the lessons in 2001 and has since taught the curriculum to hundreds of fifth grade students, says Joe Sawyer, principal. “I saw this as an idea that Larry has grown through hard work and initiative into a non-profit organization, a book and a program affecting thousands of kids in Central Massachusetts,” says Sawyer.

For his part, Lynch paid tribute to his alma mater, where he acquired the tools he used in writing the book. “Without a liberal arts education, I would not have written this book,” Lynch says. For information about Help your kids become Millionaire$, visit www.kidsfutureusa.org.

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is an Evanston-based freelance writer.