Building Teen Financial Literacy That Actually Sticks: Why I Need Honest Testers For My New Course
Last month, I was wiping salsa crumbs off my sister’s kitchen table after taco night when my 16-year-old nephew Jax dropped his phone onto the table with a groan. He’d just gotten his first paycheck from bagging groceries at the town supermarket, and half of it was already gone to a new gaming skin he’d impulse bought the night it dropped. Now he couldn’t afford the ticket to the indie concert he’d been planning to go to with his friends for two months. “School taught me how to calculate the slope of a line and who fought in the War of 1812,” he said. “No one ever told me how to not blow my entire check before the end of the first week.”
I’m a high school business teacher, have been for 12 years, and I hear this exact complaint at least once a month. Former students slide into my DMs to ask why no one explained that minimum payments on a credit card don’t mean you stop accumulating interest. Parents email me asking how to untangle the $500 in in-app purchases their 14-year-old racked up, because they never thought to walk through what “free to play” actually means. Kids graduate high school, move into their first dorm, and have no idea what a health insurance deductible is, or how to compare two car insurance plans, or why their landlord cares about their credit score when they’ve never even borrowed money.
Most of the existing financial literacy material out there for teens is useless. It’s full of lessons on balancing checkbooks no one uses anymore and 30-year retirement projections that a 16-year-old could not care less about. It’s all worksheets about compound interest that get turned in and forgotten a week later. After that taco night conversation with Jax, I started pulling together my own course, during my prep periods and slow Sunday afternoons when my own kids are at their friends’ houses. I wanted something that talks about the stuff teens actually deal with right now.
Each module is 15 minutes, max, because I know teens can’t focus on a 45-minute lecture about money after a full day of school. The first module walks through how to read an actual part-time pay stub, points out what FICA is, why your take-home pay is always less than the number you get when you multiply your hourly wage by hours worked. I’ve got another one that breaks down buy now, pay later vs. saving up, runs through the actual numbers of what happens if you miss one $25 payment. There’s a whole lesson on spotting TikTok side hustle scams, because I’ve had three students lose $200 or more to fake dropshipping courses that promise you’ll make $10k a month as a teen.
I tested the first three modules with five of my students in after school study hall last month, and that’s where I realized I need outside help. They were polite, mostly. One of them pointed out that I’d included a section on balancing a checkbook, and all five laughed and told me no one they know has ever written a check. I cut that that night. Another told me she didn’t know that forgetting to cancel a free trial could ding your credit score later, which I’d had no idea was something that wasn’t common knowledge. But they’re my students. They don’t want to tell me that the joke I made about Venmo fees is cringey teacher humor, or that a whole section is boring, or that I left out something they actually care about, like how to save for a used car or split utilities when you move off campus for college. That’s why I’m looking for honest testers.
I’m looking for parents of teens 13 to 18, high school teachers, even teens themselves who don’t mind spending 15 minutes a week going through a module and telling me what sucks. It’s completely free. All I ask is that you fill out a 5-question anonymous survey after each module to tell me what works, what doesn’t, and what you wish I’d added that I left out. No fine print, no obligation to keep going if you hate it.
Building this course has taught me a lot about what parents can do right now, even before any finished course exists, to help their kids learn about money without awkward big talks. I don’t buy the whole “sit your kid down for an annual money conversation” idea, that never works. It feels like a lecture, and kids tune out. Instead, try small, casual things that take less than two minutes. Next time you check out at the grocery store, point to the total on the screen and say “We spent $120 on groceries this week, that’s up $15 from last month because of the price of eggs” – it just normalizes talking about money, which most families never do. When your teen gets their first part-time job, sit down with them for 2 minutes when their first check comes, and point out the tax deduction line so they see why it’s smaller than they expected. If they want to buy a $70 pair of sneakers, ask them to count how many hours of babysitting or bagging groceries they’ll have to work to pay for it before they hit buy. I’ve seen these small moments stick way better than any textbook lesson.
I don’t know if this course will end up being good. I don’t plan to charge for it if it works out, I just want something that teachers can pull up in homeroom or parents can share with their kids that doesn’t put them to sleep. Right now it’s half done, a little messy, and full of gaps I can’t see because I’ve been staring at it for six months. I need people who will tell me the truth, even if it means the whole thing needs to be rearranged, or I have to cut my favorite lesson on budgeting because no one finds it useful.
I don’t have a fancy marketing plan or a big launch date. I just want to build something that actually addresses the problems teens run into right now, not the problems they’ll have 30 years from now. If you’re interested in testing it out, drop a comment below or send me an email at the address in my bio. I’ll send you the first module next week, no strings attached. I’m just curious to see what other people think I’m missing.
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