An 8-Step Process for Finding the Top Personal Finance Curriculum

Now let’s see how a real-world professional took advantage of these resources to make the most of a personal finance curriculum:

Fernando is a supervisor at an event planning company, and is currently training a small team of interns who are in the midst of a one-year internship program. They collectively needed help with their own money matters, so he was hoping he could find an effective personal finance curriculum to show them. Instead of teaching them himself, which he didn’t have time to do, he chose to find some outside help in order to deliver this highly beneficial information.

After a round of informal chats with most of his intern group, he realized that most of them lacked even a fundamental understanding of money basics – so an easy-to-digest source of reliable information would be best initial stepping stone.

At first, his initial plan was to help them acquire money management knowledge by himself through giving them a series of workshops using interactive personal finance lesson plans. He hoped to enable them to better their personal financial situations as fast as was manageable, so he figured a stripped-down course that stuck to the basics would be his best bet. Peering into the future, though, he hoped that the long-term benefit would be that this group turns into semi-experts when it comes to personal money matters.

With Fernando already decided when it came to his short-term blueprint and future plans for the group, he could start to find the best way to provide them with this important education. How could he best deliver this information? At what pace? He wanted to opt for a course that enabled the group to do it at their own pace, in order to work with their mismatched availability when it came to scheduling – which drove him to opt for an online course – but one that wouldn’t feel boring to the group. He also wanted outcomes to be more than just memorizing personal finance terms, he wanted them to apply what they learned to works toward better financial health.

What Fernando realized he needed was a program option that addressed this focus with the help of interactive and appealing activities, and one that would also be able to function alongside everyone’s clashing personal schedules. That’s why he opted to go with traditional instructor led training, flipped classroom style training for certain lessons and some interactive personal finance games to add gamification to the instruction.

Fernando would definitely be able to lead a structured educational program to this group, but he was afraid that his own personal disorganization could produce an unstructured personal finance course curriculum. He needed to find some help, preferably a highly-organized person who would be experienced at designing a personal finance curriculum map. Because of that concern, he got in contact with an expert an the NFEC who know how to teach personal finance effectively who was skilled in this area.

Out of the group of interns, which totaled 10 individuals, 9 of them managed to successfully finish the entire personal finance course curriculum – a 90% completion rate. From that group of 9 successful interns, 100% of them mentioned in a post-course questionnaire that the program helped them to “significantly” boost their understanding of personal finance. After the dust had settled at the end of the program, Fernando continued to generate a complete report that highlighted the full results. This way, he could show exactly how helpful and impactful the course had been.