Kids are dumb.

Why your kids expect to be rich

'Turns out most kids think they'll soon earn six-figure incomes. Here's why their expectations are so removed from reality and how you can help your offspring avoid the fallout.

Plenty of adults are delusional about money, so it shouldn't come as too much of a shock that teenagers can be unrealistic when it comes to their future finances.

Still, the extent to which teens misjudge their prospective earning power says something interesting -- about them and about the rest of us.

I refer to tidbits from the "Teens and Money" survey Charles Schwab released earlier this year. This poll of 1,000 Americans aged 13 to 18 from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds found that 73% believed they would earn "plenty of money" when they were adults.

In fact, the teenage boys expected to make an average $174,000 annually. Teenage girls expected to earn $114,200.

The reality check:

* Median earnings of men who worked full time, year round in 2005, the latest year for which Census Bureau statistics are available, was $41,386.
* Women working full time made a median $31,858.
* Fewer than 5% of the U.S. population makes more than $100,000, according to the bureau. Only one household out of six report a six-figure income, according to the Federal Reserve's 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances.


You might expect teens to overestimate their potential earning power if they were planning to become professional athletes, actors or hip-hop recording artists.

But sports and entertainment ranked only in the middle of the 20 career options chosen by the surveyed teens. Far more popular were medicine (including jobs as doctors, nurses and medical technicians), technology (including jobs in programming, network operations and computer repair) and teaching, the three career fields that most interested the kids polled.'