Schools in the News
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Aug 16, 2017
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Schools In News, Teaching Strategies, Behavioral Finance, Personal Finance, Career
Showing Students it’s OK to Not to Have it All (Jump$tart)
For MaryBeth, personal finance is – personal. She began her career as a credit union teller and saw that some of her customers lacked basic financial knowledge. To help, she worked to build relationships with her customers and help them be more financially secure. She did this by explaining the difference between debit and credit, helping customers with checkbook reconciliation and loan counseling.
Innovative Educator...
NGPF Launches One-Semester Course
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...
Schools in the News
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Aug 02, 2017
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Featured Teachers, Personal Finance, Lesson Idea, Financial Literacy, Teaching Strategies, Schools In News, Tips for Teachers
Franklin Military Academy financial literacy course receives high marks (Richmond Free Press)
The passionate discussion of Phyllis Jackson’s students can be heard long before reaching her classroom at Richmond’s Franklin Military Academy. On a recent warm afternoon, Ms. Jackson’s students are divided into small groups to tackle an assignment in her economics and personal finance class: To figure out the cost of transportation to and from work and budgeting the money to cover it.
At...
Tim Talks To: Allie Nault, Advocate for Financial Education and Miss America's Outstanding Teen
I know you will enjoy my conversation with Allie Nault, Miss America’s Outstanding Teen for 2016. From working at a 24 hour diner to grilling presidential candidates about our nation’s debt, Allie has a level of composure and maturity well beyond her years. She uses her platform to advocate for financial literacy and she travels throughout the country talking to students, parents, and teachers about the importance of financial education. Listen to this podcast and you will learn...
Research: What's In Your Course Catalog?
A team at NGPF is diligently scouring thousands of high school course catalogs this summer to answer the question, “Who has access to a personal finance course?” Look for our research results later this summer. I think that course descriptions are telling in that demonstrate 1) the topics covered in the course and 2) how the instructor is marketing the course to students. Here are 5 of the more dynamic personal finance course descriptions that our crack research team identified:...
A Simple Approach to Investing (Podcast and Article)
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jul 10, 2017
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Investing, Research, Personal Finance, Index Funds, Current Events, Podcasts
I just got back from a ride to the coast listening to Meb Faber’s podcast with surgeon and investor Bill Bernstein. I have read a bunch of Bill’s books (Intelligent Asset Allocator, Four Pillars of Investing, Investor’s Manifesto) and he has had quite an impact on my approach to investing (index funds, tilt towards small cap and value). Bill has a great quote in the podcast that really resonated with me: “Investing is simple but not easy.”
First, the simple. He...
Chart: How Are Millennials Investing Their Money?
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jun 27, 2017
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Chart of the Week, Question of the Day, Research, Personal Finance, Investing, Stocks, Current Events, Math, compound interest
Hat tip to The Reformed Broker for this thought-provoking chart which will get your students thinking about the importance of asset allocations:
Questions for students:
Note: Equities are synonymous with stocks, fixed income means bonds, think of cash as a savings/checking account and alternatives would be alternative investments like hedge funds or private equity.
What are the top four assets that millennials are investing in?
Now rank the assets from highest to lowest historical return....
NGPF Podcast: Tim Talks to Kiplinger Editor and Author Janet Bodnar
It was great to have Kiplinger editor Janet Bodnar on the podcast recently. As a newly minted college graduate, I recall leafing through a Kiplinger magazine (pre-internet) and benefitting from their practical, easy to understand financial advice. As an editor, columnist and author, Janet has an amazing depth of knowledge about personal finance. We focused our conversation on what we should be teaching young people about money as well as the importance of encouraging women to develop...
Do Your Weekly Lunches Cost You $90,000 in Retirement Savings?
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Jun 14, 2017
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Chart of the Week, Behavioral Finance, Budgeting, Personal Finance, Article, Math, Retirement
“US households spent $3,008, or about $8.35 a day, on average, eating out in 2015… Investing $3,008 each year… would add up 30 years later to… more than $250,000. Similarly, investing $3.50 a day for 30 years instead of buying a latte would add up to savings of nearly $107,000”. (USA Today, June 2017)
_________
We all know that it is hard to save enough for retirement. Financial education teachers also know that students sometimes struggle to relate decisions...
Video: What Can An Inmate At San Quentin Teach Us About Personal Finance?
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jun 07, 2017
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Video Resource, Behavioral Finance, Personal Finance, Current Events
Hat tip to Ren Makino for pointing out this TED video (11:03) that demonstrates how the need for financial education permeates every corner of American society:
Questions:
What are some of the statistics that Curtis mentions about the state of finances in the U.S.?
What role does money play in the crime statistics he mentions?
What are the four timeless rules that are the foundation of Curtis’s program?
Does Curtis believe that you need a professional to manage your finances?
What are...
NGPF's Top 15 Activities, Courtesy of Jessica Endlich
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jun 06, 2017
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Activities, Activity, Budgeting, Personal Finance, Savings, Stocks, Video Resource, Case Study, Interactive
Given the comprehensive nature of our website (full disclosure: Sometimes I forget that we have certain projects/activities/data crunches/blog posts….), teachers often ask us “OK, but what are the best resources that you can recommend?” At that point, we typically turn to Jessica and she always has a few ideas to recommend. So, this month, we asked Jessica to provide us with her “Best of NGPF” specifically for the last days of school.
The responses we got from...
We Are #7, We Are #7, We Are #7: When Is the U.S. Going to Commit To Financial Education?
PISA Financial Literacy results are out and here are the standings (by country):
Yes, there we are at 487, just below average of the 10 OECD countries tested. Note that these scores from the 2015 test (not sure why it takes 2 years to release these results but I digress).
Have your students complete some of the sample questions from the test.
Strong linkage between bank accounts and test scores in this summary sheet about U.S. results: “In the United States, 53% of 15-year-old...
What I'm Reading This Weekend
Catching up on my reading this week perusing personal finance articles, blogs, newsletters. Here’s what looks interesting:
I enjoyed contributing to this story by Kathleen Lynn (Bright) whose title “Teaching Personal Finance In The Age of Venmo” highlights the need to update how we teach young people about money.
Dan Kadlec in Right About Money uses the recent ransomware hack to make the point (confirmed by research) that the financially astute are often more prone to...
Interactive: Which Tech Giant Would You Drop?
By Tim Ranzetta
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May 15, 2017
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Interactive, Activity, Personal Finance, Investing, Stocks, Current Events, Chart of the Week, Activities
Here’s a fun and quick interactive from NY Times to get your students thinking about the pervasiveness of technology companies in their lives. Students are forced to rank order the importance of the top five tech companies in their lives by selecting the order by which they would give them up (if forced by an evil monarch:) The five companies: Alphabet (Google is one of their subsidiaries), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft (interesting that three start with the letter...
The Need for Financial Education Is Everywhere...!
As we embark on an advocacy strategy that you will see unfold in the weeks and months, I become more convinced everyday that there is a groundswell of grassroots support for making financial education as much a part of K-12 as the three Rs. I also am beginning to recognize the gaping hole that exists for financial programs targeting underserved populations. This kind of fits the innovation model described in this Clay Christensen Harvard Business Review article where a disrupter targets...
