The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

Wheeling in profits

By David Burton

Katie Schreier ’11 fell in love with a red Porsche Boxster S when she was 4 years old. Schreier would spend her weekends at racetracks with her father, a former racecar driver who collected and restored rare cars.

With a mass fortune of $10 stored in her piggybank, Schreier got a loan from her father and began to invest money in the stock market.

“I was 4 years old and I had no clue what to invest in or what the stock market was,” she said.

Opening up a junior account, she chose companies that she wanted to invest in based on what she liked. She liked soda: Coca-Cola. She liked teddy bears: Build-a-Bear. She liked happy meals: McDonald’s. She liked cartoons: Disney. Schreier’s investments in these four companies doubled each year for the next four years.

Even though her money was growing in the stock market, she still had to pay her father back the money he loaned her. To do this, Schreier cleaned tires at the race track at a quarter per tire. When she turned 10 years old, Schreier began babysitting, walking dogs and running and updating websites.

She invested all the money she made from those jobs in her stocks.

“I never spent my money, I always saved it,” Schreier said. “It got harder and harder to save as I grew older and started to like things like clothes and shoes.”

When she turned 12, Schreier took her money out of companies such as Disney and McDonald’s and invested it in companies once again based on what she liked: computers. By the age of 15, Schreier had enough money to start looking for her dream car.

Schreier looked in the classified section of newspapers, websites, private owners, dealerships and magazines for the car she had worked most of her life for.

After months of looking, Schreier found a private owner in San Diego selling a car that was identical to the one that she wanted, a red Porsche Boxster S.

“I was bouncing off the walls,” Schreier said. “It was all that I dreamed of and more. I immediately fell in love with it.”

After inspecting the car, she and her father drove it back to Los Angeles.

Two weeks later after filling out paperwork, making the car officially hers, Schreier walked out to her new car, and instead of washing the tires, jumped in behind the wheel, started the engine, and drove off.

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Wheeling in profits