Help with money

When I talk to students about money, it’s usually in the context of financial aid and paying for college. However, there’s a lot more to money and finances than that one expenditure, no matter how large. Most students—and most adults—could use some help with financial literacy. “Financial literacy” is the basic knowledge of how to manage your money to be better able to live your life the way you’d like to. It’s one component of what we now call “adulting.”

To build up my own library of financial literacy resources I can share with students, I asked a bunch of friends—including two Certified Financial Advisors—what sorts of tools they would recommend to high school students. I got a lot of good answers, and I’d like to pass on a few them. Here are some good places to begin learning more about financial literacy: a book, a game, a podcast, and an app.

The book. Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind, by Sarah Newcombe. While Newcombe’s 2016 book includes lots of practical things like assessments, exercises, worksheets and strategies, what makes it great is the focus on emotion and values. Loaded understands that money and finances come with very deeply rooted stories, experiences, feelings, and values. Money is loaded with our very sense of ourselves, our culture, and our families. Loaded begins with the psychology and ethics, and only then moves into the practical how-to exercises. Newcombe treats the readers as complex people, not just entities with bank accounts.

The game. Build Your Stax. This game takes about 20 minutes to play. You’re given a starting amount of money, and you get “paid” more on a regular basis. Your task is to invest that money as you get it, with the goal of making as much money as you can by the end. It introduces and explains, one at time, seven different investment types: savings account, certificate of deposit, index fund, individual stock, government bonds, crop commodiites, and gold. You choose how much to put in each type of investment, and then you can see how well you fare. You can play alone or with a group to make it a competition. You’re not going to learn how to balance your checkbook, manage credit cards, or budget from this game. But through repeated cycles of the game, you can learn a lot about how to balance risk and the pros and cons of different types of investment. Plus, it’s fun!

My stax, being built

The podcast. Planet Money Summer School. Planet Money has long been one of my favorite podcasts—just ask my kids, who have to hear “Planet Money did a podcast on that” all the frickin’ time. There are years’ worth of episodes to sift through to find what you may want. Luckily, the past two summers they’ve done a series called Summer School to go over the basics. These episodes are made with students in mind. Last summer’s series was on microeconomics (the kind of economics that’s about individuals, not national economies), and this summer’s series was on investing. Everything I know about economics—which is less than an actual economist, but more than most non-economists—I learned from listening to Marketplace and Planet Money. Planet Money’s Summer School can help anyone reach that level of understanding easily and quickly.

The app. YNAB. YNAB, for You Need A Budget, is a budgeting app that helps people set up and follow a budget. It’s made for your phone and is high-tech, but its basic methodology is old and proven: the envelope system. The app isn’t free, but there is a free trial period. And a month may be long enough to learn their four rules and see how they work in reality. I’ve found that budgets, like meditation routines or organizing systems, are highly personal and difficult to begin. But the more you try, and the more systems you try, the more likely you are to find something that works for you.

Good luck with your money, no matter if it’s a little or a lot!

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