One of the most common questions we get is: "Is it worth giving a small amount? Like, what does €100 actually become?" Let's run the numbers.

The setup

A friend gives €100 on the day a baby is born, into a global all-world ETF. They never add another cent. The ETF returns the long-run global equity average, about 8% per year, with the usual ups and downs averaged in.

What does that €100 become by the time the child is 18?

The number

About €400.

That's it. Four times what was given, real-terms-ish (inflation eats some of it, but not nearly all). The child receives a single €100 gift and, eighteen years later, can use it to buy:

  • A laptop for university,
  • Or two months of groceries while they figure out their first month of rent,
  • Or a flight to somewhere that changes their life.

That's from one €100 gift. Imagine the math when ten friends each give €100 over the years. Or twenty.

What scales it up

Three things make this number much bigger:

  1. Multiple givers. Ten people contributing €100 once = €1,000 in. By 18, that's ~€4,000. Forty people = ~€16,000. The math doesn't care who put it in.
  2. Recurring contributions. €25 every birthday and Christmas, by one grandparent, for 18 years = roughly €2,400 at age 18. The kid received €900 of stamps, but compounded into more than double.
  3. Time itself. If the kid keeps the money invested past 18, say to age 40, that single €100 from birth becomes ~€2,200. Same gift. Same fund. Just more time.

The catch (that isn't a catch)

Past returns don't guarantee future ones. The market could underperform its 100-year average over any specific 18 years. The math we ran above is the long-run smoothed version; reality wobbles.

Even so, the global stock market hasn't had a 20-year period of negative real return in the last century. It has had decade-long flat patches. It has had vicious single-year crashes. None of them have stopped a buy-and-hold ETF from coming out ahead over a child's lifetime.

The boring strategy is the one that works. The "but what if the next 18 years are different" anxiety is real, and also: every previous generation had reasons to think theirs would be the one where the strategy stopped working. None of them was right.

The smaller question, answered

So, is €100 worth giving? Yes. It buys the kid a real thing they couldn't afford otherwise, eighteen years from now, with no further effort from anyone. That's a very high return on a single grand-uncle's evening.