Why most teen financial literacy fails, and what I built that’s different (looking for honest testers)
Last December, I sat across from my 16-year-old niece Lila at my sister’s kitchen table, picking at a half-eaten sugar cookie dusted with green Christmas sprinkles, while she fanned out crumpled gift cash on the table. “Three hundred twenty dollars,” she said, tapping the stack. Her phone pinged three times in a row with TikTok notifications. “Don’t tell my mom, but I’m spending $220 of it on that custom engraved Hydro Flask everyone has. The other hundred… I don’t know. It’ll just hang out in my Venmo until I find something else.”
I’m a 10th grade business basics teacher, so I asked her what she thought about the financial literacy unit they’d just finished in school. She laughed. “It was just a bunch of videos about credit scores and retirement. Mrs. whatever just played them and graded us on a multiple choice quiz. I didn’t retain any of it. It didn’t matter.”
That line hit me. I’d been saying the same thing to myself for years. The district-approved financial literacy materials I get are full of questions about calculating APR on a 30-year mortgage and planning for a 401(k) contribution when you’re 30. Most of my students don’t even have their first part-time job yet. Those topics might matter one day, but they don’t matter right now, so they go in one ear and out the other.
Last semester, I assigned the standard “life budget” project, where students pick a career and map out their expenses after college. Half of them just pulled random numbers out of thin air. When I asked one of my better students why he’d guessed $200 a month for groceries, he shrugged and said “I don’t know how much my parents pay for groceries. Why am I planning for rent when I don’t even pay for my own phone bill?” He had a point.
That’s when I decided to build my own course, built around the money questions teens actually have right now. I spent four afternoons a week this past summer drafting units, talking to my own students about what they actually wanted to learn, cutting all the stuff that didn’t matter. There’s a unit on how to politely ask a friend to pay you back the $40 they owe you for concert tickets, when they’ve been ignoring the question for three weeks. There’s a whole section on spotting TikTok side hustle scams, because half my students were asking me about those dropshipping schemes that claim to make you $10k a month in six months. We talk about why your first paycheck is always smaller than you expected it to be, because of taxes and insurance that get taken out before you get it. We talk about how to decide if taking out student loans is worth it for the career you want, instead of just saying “all student debt is bad” or “you have to go to a four-year college anyway.”
I tested the first three units with my own class this fall, and it was wild how engaged they were. We did a role-play activity where one student was the person who owed money, and the other had to ask for it back. One girl told me after class that she’d been avoiding asking her cousin for $150 she’d lent her for a prom dress for two months, and she used one of the scripts we talked about that night. She got the money back three days later. That’s the kind of win that never happens with the old curriculum.
Along the way, I’ve picked up a few small things any parent can do right now, even before this course is finished. Next time you’re paying a bill online, don’t close your laptop when your teen walks in. Call them over for 60 seconds and say “I just paid our internet bill this month, it’s $85. That comes out of the money we budget for monthly utilities.” You don’t have to give a big lecture, just let them see how regular, everyday money works. If your teen gets cash or a check for a birthday or holiday, tell them to split it three ways right away: one third to spend on anything they want right now, one third to save for something they want in the next six months, and one third to put away for something big like a car or college. It’s a small habit that builds way more understanding than just telling them “you should save more.”
I’m done with the first full draft of the 6-week course now, and I’m looking for honest testers. I’m not a big education company, I’m just a teacher who got tired of using materials that don’t work. I need parents of 13- to 18-year-olds, or high school teachers who teach advisory or study skills, who are willing to try the course for free. All I ask is that you fill out three short 5-minute surveys over the 6 weeks, and if you’re a parent, your teen fills out an anonymous 10-question survey at the end to tell me what they actually thought. I don’t care if you hate it, I just want honest feedback to fix the parts that don’t work.
I don’t think this course will fix every money problem teens will ever have. I know some kids will still overdraft their first checking account, or fall for a dumb scam, just like I did when I was their age. When I graduated college, I had no idea how much my car insurance would go up after I got a speeding ticket, and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t pay my credit card bill that month. I just think teens deserve to learn about money in a way that fits their lives right now, not the lives they’ll have 30 years from now.
Right now I have 15 spots open for testers. It’s all online, self-paced, and it takes about 20 minutes a week, so it doesn’t add a lot of extra stuff to already busy schedules. If you’ve ever looked at your teen and thought they’re not actually learning anything useful about money in school, and you’re willing to give a rough new course a try and tell me what you really think, I’d love to have you. We’ll see how it goes.
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