NGPF Blog

One of the frustrating insights from our recent research report, Who Has Access To Financial Education In America Today? was how infrequently "paying for college" (or some variant) was covered in a personal finance course. Yes, while scouring 11,000 websites and 18,000 course descriptions, college was far down the list of terms that were most frequently cited. Yet, when you consider both the gravity of the college decision (and it's long-term impact) as well as the timeliness of such information...

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I'm so proud of the NGPF team (Jessica, Sonia, Amanda, Laura, Ren, Sid and Niko) and the way they came together to achieve great things, namely launching our One-Semester Course, just in time for the school year. It was a marvel to witness the collaboration and choreography required to complete such a monumental task in such a short period of time. Kudos to this amazing team who kept their commitment to educators to deliver this curriculum in time for the 2017-18 school year.  NGPF's...

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Answer (from NY Times; subscription): 78% or $671! More from the Times article: An annual analysis by insuranceQuotes.com, a rate comparison site, found that adding a teenager still increased annual premiums substantially, but the magnitude of the increase has been falling over the past few years. Adding a single teenager to a policy caused annual premiums to increase an average of 78 percent, or $671. But rate increases have been decreasing since 2013, when the average increase was 85 percent....

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I really enjoyed the recent conversation I had with Marla Blow who is not your typical credit card executive. She runs a start-up credit card company (FS Card, Inc.) focused on helping subprime customers get their “sea legs” to establish a positive credit history.  In a sense, she has been preparing for this role for her entire career. You will hear about her odyssey from modeling losses in credit card portfolios during  the Great Recession to signing on as an early team...

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Interesting WSJ article (subscription) highlights how dramatically the concept of car ownership is changing in light of current ride-sharing trends and the potential for autonomous vehicles in the future. Here’s a graph that shows how new car buying has slowed dramatically among younger Americans: Other key points from this article (about a 5 minute read): 1/4 of miles driven may be through shared, self-driving vehicles by 2030: “Car ownership, for a long time, has symbolized...

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Thanks to Andy Rachleff for this great conversation on the NGPF podcast recently. To say Andy has had an amazing career is an understatement. To name just a few of his roles: Founder of a premier venture capital firm (Benchmark), successful venture capitalist, sought after entrepreneurship instructor (Stanford Graduate School of Business) and currently a co-founder and CEO of a financial services disrupter (Wealthfront). Andy shares the insights he has gained over his illustrious career as well...

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Today on the podcast we hear from NGPF’s Jessica and Sonia about the new One-Semester Course that they are creating. We often hear from teachers that NGPF has great content but also that there is SO much of it.  Given how busy you are, we wanted to make it easy for you by developing the “greatest hits” of NGPF that you could fit into a semester course. Putting their problem-solving hats on, Jessica and Sonia are in the process of developing a One-Semester Course of exactly...

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A whole lot of peoples’ pain ($33 billion in overdraft fees) seems like an opportunity to one entrepreneur! From BusinessInsider: Mark Cuban was crushed with overdraft fees in his 20s. Now he’s backing an app that’s trying to help people avoid having to pay them. The billionaire has invested in a new app called Dave that aims to predict coming expenses for users to help prevent them from overdrafting on their bank accounts. Have your students go to Dave.com and review the app:...

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Tesla now worth more than Ford but their valuation depends on hitting aggressive sales targets for Model 3 (Economist) But Tesla is going to have to crank production up by an awful lot more to make the 500,000 cars a year which Mr Musk wants to see pouring off the production line by 2018, let alone the 1m intended for just two years later. To reach those volumes, Tesla is counting on its forthcoming Model 3. Priced at around $35,000, the new car will cost around half that of the other two...

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In case you missed it in January, NGPF has heard the call, and we’re beginning to translate our original activities and projects into Spanish for use with your English Language Learners. Don’t worry — we’re not relying on my own poor command of the Spanish language (muy malo) — we’ve hired an awesome translator who is working through our resources in batches of 10. With eleven batches now complete, we’ve got 83 activities/projects across Checking,...

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Asked to teach a 7-hour course at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, we polled the seniors at this high performing all-girls school to find out what personal finance topics they most wanted to learn, and they came back with: How to budget during college and/or grad school Understanding how credit cards and loans work Buying a car And how to invest We rounded out their 5-class course with an hour on credit scores and, after working with the students, realized they also had a lot of questions about...

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From Press Release: Today, Time Inc. (NYSE:TIME) launches Coinage, a new video-first brand covering personal finance that runs across 22 Time Inc. sites. Coinage will feature 600 short-form videos throughout 2017 to help guide everyday choices consumers make in spending, saving and investing for themselves and their families across all stages of life in a lighthearted and entertaining fashion. Here are the first three videos they released. Each are between 1-2 minutes: Super Bowl: discusses how...

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The DonorsChoose/NGPF Program where teachers can earn credits for teaching financial skills expires on April 30, 2017. Visit this page for updated information.  ———————————————— Next Gen Personal Finance (NGPF) is committed to expanding access to high quality personal finance educational content. Through our partnership with DonorsChoose.org, we will be bringing our engaging and easy to implement...

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You know we here at NGPF are always happy to help, which is why we didn’t think twice about responding to a unique email we received through our website. Dorothy was trying to solve a problem involving her church group: It’s got members who have joined at various points, anywhere from the past year to being a charter, founding member of the organization. They wanted to buy funeral flowers, as the members pass away, at varying price points based on length of membership. Dorothy turned...

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I received an email from a personal finance curriculum in my inbox this morning (nothing unusual here, I get a lot of them:). The provider was encouraging their educators to update their curriculum since they had heard some were still using their 2001 edition (Remember Friends? That was the top TV show in 2001). Yikes! Quick digression, ok, let’s call it a commercial: Since NGPF makes all of its content available online, we make real-time updates when circumstances change, such as when...

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