Monday, July 1, 2013

Financial Reality Check

By Holly Smith
Cluster Specialist
Business Management & Administration
Finance

If I could teach my seven and nine year-old girls something, it would be a greater understanding of money.  While they aren’t teenagers, they would spend  money like teenagers.  We implemented the Dave Ramsey soup cans of “save” “give” and “spend”, but that wasn’t capturing their attentions.  Then, we took them to the bank and they opened savings accounts and received their very own debit cards for deposit and withdrawals only.  As you can imagine, we now are scouring two messy bedrooms for those cards.
If you think about it, my girls aren’t much different than our teenager students.  Most of them want to spend money, may lose interest in saving money, and often lose track of money.  Where does a CTE teacher begin to wade through all of the available information out there to implement some practical information about personal finances?


I suggest starting with “The Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy” http://www.jumpstart.org. The emphasis is from pre-kindergarten through college age, and promotes lifelong financial success.  This site has a “rich” list of free resources which include single lessons and learning games as well as comprehensive courses.  They show you the National and State Standards in K-12 Personal Finance Education.  They have also listed their best practices for any teacher who would like to submit for publication.
 
The best tool for a teacher to implement in the classroom is their “Reality Check”. 
While it isn’t a precise budgeting tool, it will give students (especially your seniors) a valid assessment of what it will cost to live the life they want.  Have students go online, fill it out and look at their reality check.  They will be told what their average weekly salary needs to be after taxes, given some jobs that make that average salary, and then given the average salary earned according to degree of education achieved.
To keep the conversation going, ask the following questions:
1)    By a show of hands, how many of you need to make more money?
2)    How many of you need to reevaluate your luxury expenses? (i.e. haircuts, manicures, eating out)
3)    What are some other luxury expenses that you don’t feel you can live without? (answers will be type of car, clothing, happy hours, hair color treatments, etc.)
4)    If you have a luxury item that you refuse to lose, are you a bad person?  What are your guidelines for luxury spending?
5)    How, if at all, have your plans for your future changed based on this reality check?
I hope you will find this reality check fun and useful. 
Retrieved from May 14, 2001, from http://www.jumpstart.org/reality-check.html

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