Women's Money Wisdom

Episode 217: Teaching Kids Money Basics with Melissa Gordon

• Melissa Joy, CFP® • Season 4 • Episode 217

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Melissa Joy is joined by teacher Melissa Gordon to explore why it's crucial for kids to learn about money management early on. Melissa Gordon shares why it’s never too early to start developing budgeting, investing, and retirement planning skills.

This episode discusses how having open money conversations at home and school can prevent future financial pitfalls. Listen for why your kids should get involved with hands-on money projects and how you can help guide them as parents.

Listen and Learn:

  • The importance of early financial education
  • Tips for making money lessons engaging for kids
  • Recommended books and programs for building money skills

Resources:

The previous presentation by PEARL PLANNING was intended for general information purposes only. No portion of the presentation serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice from PEARL PLANNING or any other investment professional of your choosing. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and it should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy, or any non-investment related or planning services, discussion or content, will be profitable, be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation, or prove successful. Neither PEARL PLANNING’s investment adviser registration status, nor any amount of prior experience or success, should be construed that a certain level of results or satisfaction will be achieved if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. PEARL PLANNING is neither a law firm nor accounting firm, and no portion of its services should be construed as legal or accounting advice. No portion of the video content should be construed by a client or prospective client as a guarantee that he/she will experience a certain level of results if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. A copy of PEARL PLANNING’s current written disclosure Brochure discussing our advisory services and fees is available upon request or at https://pearlplan.com/

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. I'm Melissa Joy, a certified financial planner and the founder of Pearl Planning. My goal is to help you streamline and organize your finances, navigate big money decisions with confidence and be strategic in order to grow your wealth. As a woman, you work hard for your money and I'm here to help you make the most of it. Now let's get into the show. Today we're going to cut right to the cutting edge of personal finance for adolescents those people who are growing into adulthood and I'm bringing in an educator to have this conversation.

Speaker 1:

Melissa Gordon is a business and accounting and finance educator in the Ann Arbor School District at Huron High School. Her students call her Miss Gordon or Miss G, and she is deep in personal finance. She's a distinguished educator of personal finance for NGPF. She's going to tell you about that organization today, and I'm just so excited because I know so many of our listeners are thinking about how to both bone up on their own financial education but also pass that along to the people that they care about, many of whom are younger. So, ms Gordon, melissa, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.

Speaker 1:

We connected on Twitter, I'm not going to call it X, because I just still think of it as Twitter. Neither of us can remember, but it was about a year ago. You were talking as a perspective of a teacher and your students' reactions to some news and personal finance, and we've been meaning to do this episode for the past year. So thank you for coming on today, thank you for having me. I want to start by getting some perspective on what it's like to be a personal finance educator. Did you go to school to teach business and finance or how did you find yourself here Technically?

Speaker 2:

yes, I just didn't know that personal finance was really going to be one of the classes that I was going to teach. But my senior year of high school I took accounting and I really, really enjoyed it. But I didn't want to be an actual accountant. Accountant my favorite part was teaching the people around me how to do the accounting, because I really enjoyed it. And I was like, oh, you need help with that, let me help you. And that kind of led me into this whole world of becoming a business educator. So I went to Eastern, where they at the time it was the business services and technology education degree, and while I was that's Eastern.

Speaker 1:

Michigan. For those of you out of state, many of our listeners are in Michigan, where we both are, but Eastern Michigan has a great education school, so great place to go to learn.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think at the time they were one of three people. There were three schools in the state that had that degree and while I was there it ended up turning into the business management, marketing and technology education degree. Wow, that's a mouthful. Yeah, in addition to being able to teach business classes and management classes and technology classes, they added in the marketing. Yeah, in addition to being able to teach business classes and management classes and technology classes, they added in the marketing as well.

Speaker 2:

It used to be kept separate. You either went in for marketing education or business services and technology. So while I was there, that change happened. So I ended up being in school for six years due to the fact that that degree did not need a minor. But I ended up minoring in secondary math as well, because at the time both my parents are educators, retired educators and the school that my dad was working at the business teacher there who I was doing pre-student teaching hours with said Melissa really needs to get a degree in math as well, because the business jobs at the time were decreasing in number. Okay, shot classes out the career technical education stuff was decreasing in. High schools at the time were decreasing in number. Okay, shot classes out. The career technical education stuff was decreasing in high schools at the time, so we're talking about 20 years ago.

Speaker 1:

Well, a lot's changing. Is that the case now? Or do you find that there's job security?

Speaker 2:

and knowing that business side of things, I think there is job security, where there's been fewer and fewer people that have been coming through to do their student teaching or to do pre-student teaching hours.

Speaker 2:

We used to have a couple every single year and now it's like one every other year, so I don't feel like it's as popular as it used to be. Like you are, you can prove the fact that you've worked in industry for so long. All are required to work in industry for at least 4,000 hours to get our vocational teaching certificate and since you're able to prove that, you can actually just walk in essentially and say I'm going to be a business teacher, I'm going to be a nurse. I'm going to be the teacher who teaches our health sciences program. I'm going to be the culinary arts teacher. I'm going to be the teacher who teaches our health sciences program. I'm going to be the culinary arts teacher. I'm going to be those people. So you don't necessarily have to go through school, like I did, to get a major in education to then become a business teacher. So there's a lot of different avenues to get to what I'm doing and people are taking those other avenues versus doing the more traditional route that I took.

Speaker 1:

Got it. So give me some examples of classes that you're teaching now and how they intersect with our world of personal finance.

Speaker 2:

Definitely personal finance one. Personal finance two. Huron has been offering those classes since, I believe, 2004. Personal finance one really consists of you're going to school. What do I want to go to school for? Where am I going to go to school when I graduate? What am I going to do? How do I fill out a resume? Or how do I complete a resume? How do I fill out a job application? What happens when I get my first paycheck?

Speaker 2:

Evaluating job offers and then, moving into now that you have your first paycheck, how do you pay your taxes Now that you have money? Where are you putting it? What's it going into in terms of checking banking accounts, checking accounts, savings accounts, what are your choices there? And then we move on to budgeting and do a big unit about budgeting. And then we finish the semester off with an investing unit and talking about retirement. And we also include when we're doing the payroll taxes or payroll and paychecks. We talk about Social Security and go through lessons about Social Security and Medicare. And then personal finance too, and you can take two without taking one. You can take one and not take two. They're not contingent on each other, but two really focuses on credit, credit cards, credit reports identity theft and insurance uh, auto insurance, renter's insurance, medical insurance and uh, and those sorts of things. So it's uh, there's just a lot that we cover and it's a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:

I feel like we have to cover those things, though, because I'm looking through that list. I explained to you, as we got ready for this episode, that I have a ninth grader, a 14-year-old, and he's really interested in getting a job this summer. He wants to earn money so he can spend money, and the first thing he asked me when we applied for a job recently or he did I didn't do it for him, but we were talking about it and he's like mom, am I going to have to file taxes? And there's so many things that I think maybe investing is talked about a little bit more nowadays, but some of the other things, like how to write a check, how to deposit a check, those get missed and you don't see money the way you used to when we were kids, because our parents didn't pull out a card and swipe a card for everything that got done At least mine didn't and nowadays money is a little more invisible or it's just a transaction, you know, like a touch of your phone, and being able to.

Speaker 2:

Another thing about being a business teacher, being a CTE teacher, is that we have to have an advisory board meeting. So twice a year we bring in industry experts from around the area and say these are the things that we're teaching. Are we on the right track? And something that keeps getting brought up over and over again is are you teaching children how to endorse a check and that is one thing how to address an envelope too.

Speaker 1:

I mean, like you need to start way back.

Speaker 2:

There's so many things you can cover, so many things, so little time. But you really have to break it down to the bare bones when you go to apply for the job and you're filling out that application. Okay, I've got the job. Now I have to fill out a W-4. What's a W-4? Why is this important? How does this impact me when I go to file my taxes? Do I have to file my taxes? Did I make enough money that I should file my taxes? Well, depending on how you fill out that W-4, it will depend whether or not you do have to file taxes as a minor. So there's all these different things that all work together. But if you don't understand one piece of the puzzle, you could be losing out on money or being taken advantage of, and that's really not good. So we're really focusing on trying to get the kids to understand all of these different puzzle pieces, hoping that they can be exposed to them in the high school setting in a safe and fun environment, so that when they leave, or even when they're still in school.

Speaker 2:

I think I posted up on Twitter a year ago or a year and a half ago. It's like hey, ms G, I just got my W-2 in the mail and, thanks to your class, I knew exactly what it told me. That must feel so good. That's amazing. I forwarded it to my CTE director and I said hey, here's another one of those things where all teachers, I think, have one of those folders where I'm having a bad day. I need to look at this, or just a way to remember kids, and it's always really special to have kids reach out and say here's what I'm up to now and to have them actually know. When I looked at my W-2, when I first got a W-2, I was like what is all this? I always show the friends video, like the whole FICA thing where who is FICA and why are they taking all my money?

Speaker 1:

We'll have to put that in our show notes to make sure that we can kind of give you some learning examples to discuss with your kids if you're going to bring them in. This would be a great car ride to replay this episode with the kids in the car.

Speaker 2:

So I try to bring a lot of Pulp Cartler stuff into class. I'm constantly referencing movies from like the 80s, 90s and 2000s.

Speaker 1:

They made them better.

Speaker 2:

then I reference Tom Boy today in a class and I said haven't you all seen Tom Boy? No, and I go okay, well, here's why I'm talking about that. It really is, I think the whole personal finance thing. It really is all around you. It's one of the most practical things that you see every day in your life without really noticing that it's there and you kind of don't realize how much it impacts you until it doesn't matter if you're 18. It doesn't matter if you're 12 and babysitting, it doesn't matter if you're 50. Like impacts you at every moment in your life in some way, and having a good foundation, a good understanding of it, is really important. And one of the blog posts that NGPF just came out with I think it was two weeks ago they showed that over the lifetime of a student who was exposed to personal finance in high school versus not, there was $100,000 difference in their income. Wow, so that's huge, especially when you think of the compound interest and what you can do with that.

Speaker 1:

Well, I love that you started with human capital. You started with. You have a huge asset kids that you have more of than me or than other people in the room, because you have the ability to earn based on the way you educate yourself and the way you have more years to earn than we do with the olds in the room and that time is like the eighth wonder of the world.

Speaker 2:

That's one of the first weeks, so add and drop usually goes to the first week or the first two weeks, depending on which semester we're in. One of the first things we do is what is compound interest? What does it look like if I put $500 away for the next 30 years? Okay, well, if I'm starting at 16 and I want to retire at 65, looking at that and really getting them to see that exponential growth that is possible not guaranteed, but is possible, kind of introducing them to the new vocabulary and going. These are some of the reasons why you might want to look at this, and I always celebrate whenever a kid says hey, ms J opened up a Roth IRA.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I love that.

Speaker 2:

And then just going like you did it, you did it.

Speaker 1:

This is great, and they may even be telling their parents to do the same, and mom and dad might need to hear that, not tell you how frequently we hear from parents, especially the.

Speaker 2:

What is it? The first or second, the second week or third week of school? We always do. What do they call it? I can't remember what they call it Like a back to school or curriculum night or something. It's probably curriculum night. I'm blanking on the name that we call it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the parents are also. Their heads are swirling.

Speaker 2:

I wish I had this when you were in school. This is so important, and I think the other thing is it's so nice. I always want my kids to go home and talk to their families about what they're studying, and so often they come back and say, well, now I'm in charge of this or now I'm helping my mom with that, and they just give you all these different examples of different ways that they're not only improving their life, but improving the lives of the people that are around them, and it's just that snowball effect where everybody's in a better position because of what they're learning in our class.

Speaker 1:

Well, if we pause there too, I think that in a family, dynamic, healthy conversation about money, where it's not just like one direction or another of you will do this, but like hey, have you thought about this? This is the way things work, here's what we think we'll pay for college and here's what we expect from you, like it's always better to have comfort in talking about money, like it's almost worth it, worse than death, sex and taxes in terms of people's comfort levels about talking about money. So you're really setting a great standard by having this class and then encouraging the conversations at home, or vice versa.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, and sometimes I'll send newsletters home and go. We just finished this unit. Here's the next unit that we're going to be talking about when I was teaching personal finance too and I teach tons of different classes, so I'm no longer teaching personal finance too, but I actually have my insurance license, my property and casualty license. Okay, when that was going on, I let the parents know.

Speaker 2:

At the beginning I said when we do this insurance unit, my goal is for them to be able to look at this declarations page and tell you every single coverage that you have and why it's important or whether or not you have enough coverage. So I said it's perfectly fine for you to send in your declarations page for your house, for your rental, for your auto let's look through it. But my goal is to be able to sit there and have your student be able to explain to me what everything means on there, what's covered, what's not covered and what that means. So I think also having that experience because that's how I ended up getting my 4,000 hours of my business and 4,000 hours of marketing was by working in an insurance agency, and I've had that since I was 22.

Speaker 2:

I think I've had my license since I was 22 for PNC.

Speaker 1:

Well, you gave the details about how impactful it can be to have personal finance education. I just pulled an article. I ran across it. It was published yesterday. We're recording this in April 2024. That says, in a survey of 2,000 adults, three out of five respondents believed that they had an insufficient grasp of credit and personal finance, and that has led them to expensive financial mistakes and consequences. So the work that you're doing, I just wish there was more of it. Sometimes financial professionals kind of poo poo personal financial education. They say, oh, it's not the right setting or environment. But I just like we would never do that about reading or math. And so I really think that the movement toward more formalized financial education is a gift to students and to our culture and society.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and we do talk about that. If I make this decision, what are the consequences of that decision? But just like you said earlier, where you were speaking about how to save money and how to invest in yourself, it's also like is this the right decision of how to spend my money Totally? And so it's almost it's two sides of a coin too, because there's you make money, but you also spend money and you need to understand both. What is the return on investment of the degree that I'm going to get? And one of the things that we talk about is when they are researching what they want to go into. What is where the job opportunities look like? Is it increasing or decreasing for this particular job? Is it only increasing in a certain area? Does that mean you're going to have to pick up and move and go someplace else? Like, is your job only located in a certain area?

Speaker 2:

So we do have all these discussions and they start thinking about stuff, and I think my favorite part, first of all, is project-based learning. So they're doing what matters to them, because we give them an idea and then they explore it to the things that deal with them what do I want to go into? Where do? I want to go to school in terms of, like the budget project and that sort of thing, which I think also makes it more meaningful to them but then sitting with them and having those conversations and say, well, what are your thoughts, what are your thoughts? And getting them to talk to each other and then at the end, reading through the reflections and that's always my favorite part is clicking on the reflections page and having them explain to me how this has impacted them, what new thoughts they have, what new questions they have, and that's always a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:

Well, for parents. I know that the kids really at least in our school district drive a lot of the decisions on what classes they'll be enrolling in. I really encourage parents that are interested in this to have the discussions with their kids about what the impact could be. Do use that line. If you take a personal finance class, you might make $100,000 more than the average kid who did not take that class. Because I know in Dexter, where I am, the middle school has an elective class as well as in high school. But there's a lot of competition for what classes you decide to take, so that may need a little parent influence of like I have some expectations. Maybe you even create a little bit of an incentive.

Speaker 1:

And summer's coming up too, so you could do some of that project-based work with your family over the summer, and NextGen Personal Finance has this website where they have all of their curriculums on their website.

Speaker 2:

The only thing that you as a parent couldn't access would be the answer keys, but tons of different activities and data crunches and just different thoughts and different things that you can do over the summer or at any time. We talked about book recommendations, of different things, if you wanted to read a book or even a chapter or a page of some topic, because I think the biggest thing for me when I started out is it is super overwhelming. There are so many topics and there's so many layers to every single topic you go. I don't know where to start. What I did was I just kept. I'm one of those people who likes to learn something new every day.

Speaker 1:

It sounds like you're a lifelong learner.

Speaker 2:

I can tell from all of your continuing education yeah, exactly Exactly, and I get bored really easily, so I know that if I'm bored, I know my students are bored for sure, so I never want to have that happen. But when you're around like-minded people and joining that community of NextGen Personal Finance, it just keeps me going and there's always something new for me to learn, or always something new to share with my students, and they've exposed me. I never read finance books when I was growing up, and now I'm usually reading multiple finance books in a year and they're not dry and they're not boring. They're actually really interesting and they're written on a level that I can understand. I don't have to have a vast financial vocabulary in order to understand what's being spoken about, but there are also books that I can go. Oh, I think this chapter applies to what we're doing in class, and I was able to get a couple different grants so that we could get some classroom sets of some different books.

Speaker 1:

Well, can you give some examples of books that you would recommend, and I think you had some female authored books on personal finance.

Speaker 2:

My absolute favorite, though, right now and it has been since I read it is the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Yes, and the reason that's my favorite is because every single person has a different experience with money, and every single person has a different experience with how they grew up, and everybody views money differently, and I think that book helps you understand what everybody else is thinking. There's a chapter titled Nobody is Crazy, and why someone might think that buying a lottery ticket every day is the right decision for them. You become less judgy when you're thinking about what other people are doing.

Speaker 1:

Morgan Housel is such a gifted writer. My only complaint with that book is that there are very few women examples in the book, and Rihanna who's things to both the most astute, deep academic financial people all the way down to people that have never thought about money before. And so do take the reading with a grain of salt, knowing that there are really brilliant women, and he just has one viewpoint in the world. He's addressed that with some other women in finance and I think he's made some adjustments to his presentations when I've seen him speak and future writing. But also do read that book. It's fantastic. It would be a good family read.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, my favorite chapter, I think. Well, I shouldn't say my favorite chapter, but something that I always take with me is that nobody's crazy, nobody's crazy.

Speaker 1:

I love that. What else would you have on the summer reading list?

Speaker 2:

mind your money by yaneli espinal. Okay, yaneli actually is somebody who's worked for an extra personal finance for a really long time, but she has written her own book and she went to brown and she's the the child of immigrants and grew up in new york city, grew up with many siblings, ended up being in severe debt, and this is how she got herself out of it, what she started doing and how she's changed her life and how she thinks that, again, financial education should be for everyone, because you don't learn it you don't know it.

Speaker 1:

It's inspirational. I love that. And first generation money it's a whole other topic. We have a great episode from a woman who specializes in first gen wealth of first generation within people that were the first generation to be born in America and their families. So I'll make sure that we include Valerie's episode in the show notes as well as the book Perfect Perfect.

Speaker 2:

So Yaneli's done a great job and, like I said, she's also worked with CNBC. She has a YouTube page called Miss Be Helpful. I would strongly recommend Yonelli In my classroom. I do have a copy of Broke Millennial. We have a classroom set of Broke Millennial for the kids and I've also and this is by Erin Lowry, and she actually has three books. This is the first one, but we start off our investing unit with the Broke Millennial Takes on Investing. We don't read the entire book but we do read the chapter that says but are you ready? The case for investing, Love it. We're investing, Just trying to get them to understand. She also has a third called Broke Millennial Talks Money, because talking about money is difficult, it sure is. So scripts, stories and advice to navigate awkward financial conversations.

Speaker 1:

We need it, and learning young is so important.

Speaker 2:

This is somebody else from NextGen Personal Finance. The reason I know about this individual is she's actually a high school student, Ellagapta. She wrote a book called Gen Z Money Sense and in one of the many professional developments that I've been to, she was the focus of that professional development. They brought her in to speak about her book Amazing.

Speaker 1:

I love people learning and then teaching, and there's really great information out there, not only in book form, also in social media but there's also a lot of misleading information. People that don't have education don't have knowledge, but either are trying to sell something where you are kind of the commodity that's trying to be sold to, and or just like misinformed or uninformed financial advice. So, do you know, utilize professionals, like conversations like this or learning in the classroom, so that you can have a good filter to figure out what things you know do pass the sniff test of being legit and what things don't, especially in an age of algorithms.

Speaker 2:

Trust but verify is one of my favorite sayings.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I learned so much on Google but I have a sense of like, oh, I need to double check, where did this come from? And things like that.

Speaker 2:

But agreed, trust, but verify, be curious but don't assume, yeah, and anybody on Instagram can have a blue checkmark, or anybody on X or Twitter can have a blue checkmark. I'm not so sure how it works on TikTok because I've never been on TikTok, but you know that if somebody has written a book and that they have a really a solid foundation and a solid following and you've done your research on that person, whether or not they have the I don't want to call it the intelligence to be sharing what they're sharing, but you know that it's probably legit instead of yeah, the experience and perspective. If something seems too good to be true, it's probably too good to be true. So that's another conversation to have, for sure.

Speaker 1:

Well, maybe I would love, with your permission, to send a few copies of the book that I contributed to, which is all about financial planners' perspective of working with clients, and a lot of anecdotal stories. I wrote a chapter along with friends, so we would love to send a copy to the classroom for any kids that might be interested in personal finance careers.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, that would be great. And we have kids started an investment club this year and asked me to be an advisor. Three separate children came to me saying I want to start an investment club, no way.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yes. So what are you learning with the investment club? How do you guys break it down? What does it look like?

Speaker 2:

I told them that this would be kind of a trial year because, honestly, my own experience with a lot of kids is they say they're going to do something and then they don't follow through. Yeah, so I said it was going to be a trial year. I kind of wanted to keep it small, have it be 20 kids or really no more than that, and we ended up, I think, having 21 or 22. But we were supposed to meet like every two weeks and then everybody got busy with sports and it's sort of they started off with we're going to pick a topic for like every month that we meet, or every time that we meet we're going to do a lesson and then we're going to do something called a gim kit or just a way to do an interactive game with the kids, and then there would be candy and prizes for the students. So it was my students putting on education for their peers. That's awesome, it was a lot of fun. But I also said, hey, we could read books. I'm lucky enough that, now that I'm in my 14th year of teaching, that I have a pretty solid foundation of kids who have graduated that are mine and that are now in that personal finance world. So I reached out to one of them and said would you mind coming back for a Zoom meeting with my kids? And he said yes. But I then said to my students I go, you should reach out to this individual and see if they'd be interested. They're an alum of our school, they were in our Business Professionals of America club and now they are working as a financial advisor and went to school for it. So that ended up never happening. They communicated with them but our meeting ended up never happening because when he was available we weren't available.

Speaker 2:

And now we're into April. Testing season has already started. We did the SAT this week, so everybody's going crazy. Aps are about to start, our IB exams are about to start and it's just kind of like we kind of ran out of time so we're going to schedule it for next fall. But it's been one of those interesting things where it's like what is it that you want to do? What do you want to get out of this? And most of them just want to compete in their personal finance challenges, stock market challenges. But there's so much more to finance than just looking at the stock market. There's so many other things we need to learn and explore. So I think the stock market is their focus. That's why it's really the investment club, but there's a lot of other things, of other topics that I'd like for us to talk about too.

Speaker 1:

And stock markets are so sexy because, like it's like, oh, let me pick a stock that's going to get 100% in this three month period because necessarily, you know, you guys can't do a longitudinal study of what is going to be the investment returns over four years from your freshman year to your senior year. So it's tough because then, as a personal finance professional, it's kind of cringe of like. I hope they all go down so that they're not trying to stock pick when it comes to the 401k or something like that. But really interesting.

Speaker 2:

One of the activities on NextGen Personal Finance is called five stocks. You pick on your birthday and from there it's like go back to your birthday, pick five stocks and start looking at them from the day of your birth to now, so they could be 14, 15, 16, 17 years old. What are the questions that you ask then? Did that stock even exist 17 years ago? If it does, is it on the Dow or is it in the NASDAQ? And just kind of going through and seeing over time what has happened, why has the stock done?

Speaker 2:

Well, but really the overall focus, I would say obviously we don't give out financial advice because we're not certified professionals, but focusing on diversity and a low cost, diverse fund. Usually we're looking at exchange traded funds. I love that Giving that community to also explore what is a target date fund. Who would that be a good choice for? Yeah, and those sorts of things. So just giving them a lot of different levels. It's sometimes just fun to go what do you want to talk about today? And letting them kind of make the conversation happen.

Speaker 1:

Well, I love that. The more control you have over what you're up to, what you're curious about, the more interest there will be. So thank you for sustaining these discussions. They're so important, and we are going to include links to the Next Generation website so that we can make sure that there's a lot of ideas out there for our listeners, and we are doing this episode in Financial Literacy Month for April. How have you celebrated Financial Literacy Month?

Speaker 2:

There was a lot of things that we were going to do as an investment club and we've only done one of them, so I'm kind of that's okay, but it was a really great thing we ended up. There's another website called Jumpstart and they're actually the ones that came up with the national standards for personal finance education and those are some of the ones that came up with the national standards for personal finance education and those are some of the standards that we've adopted or are being adopted, because, starting in the fall of this year, a personal finance half credit is going to be required for any incoming freshman. Yay. In high school. Now they can get it through an economics class or they can get it through an actual standalone personal finance class. They can do either or I would recommend taking personal finance because I want or do both yeah, please. Or do both because you're yeah, or do both. That would also work. But we got the standards that they got, I think.

Speaker 2:

I want to say it's like a 42 or 43 page book and we're only covering like one page of those standards for the state of Michigan, which is to me kind of a bummer but at the same time so exciting because it's finally being given the.

Speaker 2:

The schools are finally valuing the importance of what it is. It's not just something oh, I'll learn this as I go, or your families will teach it to you. It's something that we can actually explore in school with teachers, and NGPF gives us so many wonderful resources. But oh yeah, why was I talking about that Jumpstart? They do something called the National Teen Teach-In, so my students participated and we reached out to Thurston Elementary School one of the fifth grade classes there, whom I'm friends with, one of the teachers and said would you be interested in us coming down and doing a presentation for your kids about financial literacy? And it went fantastic. So I'm hoping to expand that next year to maybe either more grades at Thurston or other schools around the area for our kids to go down and really kind of give back, and maybe next year in March go down for March's reading month and read some finance stories. I don't know.

Speaker 1:

I love that and there's some great videos on Twitter that show your students over at Thurston Elementary and some feedback from the kids at Thurston. What a great reminder that age-appropriate personal financial conversations can start as young as toddler and preschool, and those kids in elementary school are ready to hear it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think my students got so much out of it too at the high school level going back and seeing these kids and interacting with them, and it was really special for everyone involved.

Speaker 1:

Well, ms Gordon, melissa, thank you so much for making the time. Thank you for all that you do, and I know that our listeners are going to be clicking on those links using the resources. If any of you out there who are listening have your favorite idea, when we post this episode on social, let us know the links to where you find great anecdotes and stories about learning for the next generation and everybody, including you, melissa, keep up the good work. Thanks for all that you do, thank you it was wonderful speaking with you.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. If you found value in this episode, the best way you can support the podcast is to forward an episode to a friend or leave a review. Go to pearlplancom and the podcast link to get all the resources and links mentioned.

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Melissa Joy, CFP

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