The Main Way To Save Your Children From AI Is To Invest In AI

It’s been several months since we returned from Hawaii, and surprisingly, my FOMO about the AI tech boom has faded. Sure, I still don’t have a job paying me gobs of money as AI CapEx surges higher, but that’s OK. Instead, I’ve allocated enough money to AI investments to where I no longer feel the need to chase the industry from the inside.

You see, my real fear isn’t missing out on another AI unicorn. It’s raising kids in a crueler and harsher world—one where, partly because of their identities, they get rejected from every top-50 university they apply to. Then, by the time they graduate from a so-so university, entry-level jobs have largely been automated away by AI.

This is not some far-off dystopia. CEOs of every major company are openly exploring or adopting AI. They’re implementing hiring freezes, slashing jobs, and reducing headcount by the thousands. Accenture cutting 11,000 jobs and Lufthansa cutting 4,000 jobs due to AI aren’t outliers, they’re harbingers. Anyone paying attention can extrapolate how dire things could be 15–18 years from now, when my children are entering the workforce.

As an investor, it’s key to forecast the future. As a parent, it’s key to forecast potential misery for your children. In both cases, if you forecast even halfway properly, you’ll likely end up wealthier, calmer, and better prepared.

Jobs Are Vanishing Due To AI

Take a look at the S&P 500’s recent performance in red compared to Total Job Openings in white. Notice the inflection point: investor optimism as AI promises profitability due to increased productivity, while job openings continue to crater.

As an investor, my hope is the S&P 500 keeps climbing—history suggests it will over the long run. As a parent, my fear is that Total Job Openings will continue to collapse to 2009 levels or worse. I clearly remember the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis—that’s when I launched Financial Samurai after the seventh round of layoffs at Credit Suisse. Fear was my motivator then too.

At the pace we’re going, by 2032 we could easily see a scenario where the S&P 500 is at a record high, but job openings match the lows of the last crisis.

And yet, after privately consulting with dozens of readers this year, I don’t think most Americans realize what’s coming. Sure, I may sound fatalistic, but a large part of my wealth has come from recognizing and investing in long-term trends. And the AI bulldozer is real.

Find Your Minimum AI Investment Comfort Point

Just as there’s a “Minimum Investment Threshold” where work becomes optional and you can stop stressing about office politics, there’s also a “Minimum AI Investment Threshold” where you can stop worrying quite so much about AI wrecking your career or your children’s livelihoods.

This Minimum AI Investment Threshold is conceptually similar to your Coast FIRE number. But unlike Coast FIRE, which is too dangerous for most people to rely on, the Minimum AI Investment Threshold is an active hedge, not a passive hope.

Here’s how to calculate yours:

Plug into an AI tool. Use a compound interest calculator or your favorite AI LLM to crunch the numbers for you.

Forecast the timeline. Estimate when your job will be eliminated due to AI, or when your children will graduate high school or college and enter the job market.

Estimate future living expenses. Take today’s basic living expenses and project them forward using a reasonable inflation rate (2%–4%).

Choose your cushion. Decide how many years of basic living expenses you’ll want saved in AI investments—pick anywhere from 1 to 10 years.

Discount to today’s dollars. Use a discount rate of 2%–8% (lower if conservative) to calculate how much you’d need to invest now.

Example Using Our 8-Year-old Son

Let’s take my 8-year-old son. In the year 2040, 15 years from now, he’ll be 23 and a new college graduate from a regular university.

An income that could cover his basic needs is $40,000 a year in today’s dollars—equivalent to $62,319 at a 3% annual inflation rate in 2040.

I estimate it may take him 2–4 years of job searching to realize that his dreams of clicking buttons to optimize ads for big tech companies are out of reach. At that point, he’ll probably have to take a trades job to make ends meet. (Electricians, plumbers, and general contractors should be in huge demand given all the datacenters being built.)

So, I need to have about $125,000–$250,000 ($62,319 X 2 – 4 years) set aside for him by the year 2040 to give him that cushion.

Here’s how much I’d need to invest today to reach $125,000–$250,000 in 15 years, depending on the discount rate:

Based on a realistic worst-case scenario—him taking 4 years to realize his hopes and dreams won’t materialize—at a 2% discount rate I’d need about $185,754 invested today. That way, by the time he’s 23, I’ll have secretly set aside $250,000 in AI investments alone to help him survive.

It is vital all parents NOT tell their children exactly how much they are saving and investing for them. You don’t want them to become soft and develop an entitlement mentality.

AI Investing as a Psychological Hedge

Some of you may be scratching your heads: why invest in AI at all if I’m only assuming 2%–8% annual returns? With such modest expectations, I could just invest mostly in Treasury bonds yielding 4%–5% sprinkled with some stocks.

I hear you. But the point isn’t just the math. It’s the psychology.

Will you diligently invest for your or your children’s future specifically to hedge against AI? Maybe, maybe not. Further, I’m trying to be conservative in my assumptions.

By specifically investing in the very companies that may make your life and your children’s lives harder, it becomes easier to actually save and invest for the future. You now have a clear why behind your delayed gratification. And when you have a why, almost anything is possible.

When you start viewing AI as an unstoppable beast that could run you and your children over, you get more motivated to invest in AI companies.

Fear and Responsibility Drive Me to Invest

In 2025, driven by fear of a dire future and a strong sense of responsibility to protect my kids, I embarked on a new quest. I decided to invest the Minimum AI Investment Threshold so I could reduce my worry and even start rooting for the very technology that could harm my children.

The first step was opening a new Fundrise Venture account earmarked for my children with $26,000 in early August. (There was, and still is, a promotion where if you invested over $25,000, you got $500 for free invested in their Flagship real estate fund.)

Then, as my Treasury bills matured, I kept funneling between $15,500–$50,000 at a time into Fundrise Venture to hit my Minimum Investment Threshold. Every transfer I made into my account made me feel better.

Hedged Against Whatever Happens

Only time will tell whether investing $190,000 in 2025 in names like OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Anduril, Canva, Ramp, and dbt Labs will pan out. If they do, I’ll be thrilled. The $190,000 could grow to anywhere from $256,000 to $2.87 million, based on a 2%–20% annual return.

That means one child will either have all his or her expenses covered for four years of job-hunting or perhaps be set for life. They can pursue careers they want rather than careers they need.

Alternatively, I could potentially lose 80% of my money and end up with just $38,000 after 15 years because AI turned out to be an overhyped dud. Maybe CapEx spend is too high for the profits. Maybe the world realizes human oversight is more essential than ever—Jevons’ Paradox at work.

In that scenario, I’d be even more thrilled if both my children found livable-wage jobs they enjoyed. Because as parents, it is our responsibility to raise children to be self-sufficient adults. Needing to still depend on your parents after age 25 slowly chips away at your sense of worth.

Without the mission of protecting my kids from AI, there’s no way I would have invested $190,000 in risk assets like the S&P 500 in just two months. Most of the money came from risk-free Treasury bonds after I sold my old house earlier in 2025. In the past, I’ve dollar-cost averaged more slowly, or invested in structured notes with downside protection when valuations are high.

But once I reallocated the money from me to my children, I extended the investment time frame from “right now” to 15 years in the future. And when you have such a long runway to invest, it becomes easier to stomach risk assets.

Asset Allocation Matters Too

Finally, when deciding your Minimum AI Investment Threshold, compare that target number to your overall asset allocation. The comparison can be to your total investable capital or total net worth.

Personally, I have a target of investing up to 20% of my investable assets in alternative investments such as venture capital. Not only am I in an open-ended venture fund that invests in AI, I’m also invested in four other closed-end VC funds, and I’m considering two more that all have AI investments.

Sure, the Yale and Harvard endowments have ~40% of their assets in private equity or alternatives. But you don’t have the size, influence, or edge of a multi-billion-dollar endowment. For the average DIY investor, allocating up to 20% in alternatives is plenty.

The older (and hopefully wealthier) you get, the more important proper asset allocation becomes to ride out volatility. Review your goals, run new financial projections, and stay disciplined. It’s easy to get caught up in hype, especially in a bull market. But nothing good lasts forever.

No More AI FOMO

I’m no longer bummed I don’t have a job at a hot AI startup growing triple-digits a year. It felt like a waste not grinding it out while living in AI central, San Francisco. I’m also less bummed that AI is stealing my content on Financial Samurai and not providing a proper link back.

But now that I’ve reached the Minimum AI Investment Threshold for both kids, I’m more at peace.

It feels great to invest in hungry founders and employees working 60+ hours a week for fortune and glory, while I play pickleball during the day and write on Financial Samurai. I’m grateful to be investing in AI near the beginning of the revolution. Our young children aren’t as lucky, which is why it’s up to us to invest for them.

So, for all you AI employees out there, keep grinding and enjoy the ride. You could make enormous fortunes over the next ten years, and I’ll be grateful if you do!

Readers, how are hedging against AI destroying the livelihoods of your children? Do you think most people are aware of the risks AI poses for their job security? What are some other things we are doing to help our children thrive in an AI world?

Easy Ways To Invest In AI

If you want exposure to private AI companies, consider Fundrise Venture. The platform owns stakes in names like OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, and Databricks. AI is poised to reshape the labor market, eliminate millions of jobs, and dramatically boost productivity. Since private companies are staying private much longer than in the past, it makes sense to allocate some capital to them if you want to capture potential upside before they go public. Fundrise has been a long-time sponsor of Financial Samurai, and I’m personally an investor in their funds.

For public exposure, you can also just buy QQQ or shares of the Magnificent 7—Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla—plus Oracle, which has become a stealth AI play. The beauty of investing is that you don’t need to live in Silicon Valley to participate. From anywhere in the world, you can buy a piece of these companies leading the AI revolution.

That said, don’t forget: there are no guarantees when investing in risk assets. Fast-growing companies can be extremely volatile when downturns hit. For example, Meta lost more than half its value during the 2022 bear market before recovering. Always stay diversified, keep an eye on your asset allocation, and make sure your portfolio matches your risk tolerance.