Presenting Millennial Personal Finance Classes
There is a clear need for the Millennial generation to gain crucial financial skills, which is why many people today have developed a passion for presenting millennial personal finance classes. If you’re one of those concerned citizens who desire to develop adult financial education that reaches millennials, the information on this page can assist you to get started.
Life Events that Affect Millennials and Personal Finance
If you plan to teach millennial personal finance courses, an essential feature of your programming should be to coordinate the instruction with the particular life circumstances adults in this age group are facing today. Whether presented in the community or as a workplace financial literacy program, your methods should consider the unique millennial situation.
First, think about the need many millennials have to overcome financial problems they’ve already incurred. Many money management mistakes are possible; but we’ve identified a set of pitfalls that a sizeable proportion of today’s adult population has in common: 1) lacking clear goals; 2) lacking a well-defined plan; 3) failure to find an adequate financial advisor or coach; 4) dearth of money management knowledge; 5) seeking advice from unqualified sources (friends, coworkers); 6) problems that escalate out of control; 7) unrealistically calculating return on investment; and 8) bad financial habits shaped early.
Two other important considerations affecting millennials and personal finance include building a solid financial foundation, and a focus on long-term planning and execution of that plan so one’s financial situation can grow in a positive direction.
How Ready is your Audience to Undertake Change?
The second part of preparing to teach millennial personal finance coursework is understanding the readiness of the audience to make changes that can improve their financial situations. Millennials prefer to be taught subject matter that is relevant to their stage in the lifecycle and to the decision-making tasks they are currently confronting. When you want to learn how to teach financial literacy to adults in this age range, considering their unique challenges is the key.
In this section we describe the Stages of Change Model, which the NFEC uses to guide materials for each specific age range being taught. This theory poses six stages of readiness to make change through which people move:
• Precontemplation • Contemplation • Preparation • Action • Maintenance • Termination •
In Precontemplation, people have no ideas in their minds about taking action. They begin considering that what they’re doing is causing problems in the Contemplation stage. During Preparation, they are starting to form the notion that they may take action. As they move into the Action phase, they’re already doing some things differently. Maintenance is where their positive actions have become ingrained as habitual. And Termination represents the time when they don’t need any further intervention or support to maintain their positive actions.
Designing successful courses to connect millennials and money management skills requires getting to know where they stand along this Stages of Change continuum and ensuring that the materials support their advancement toward positive behavior change.
For further reading, PwC US and the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center published this informational guide on Millennials and financial literacy.
