Discover the Best Methods for Teaching Personal Finance

Teaching Personal Finance is a skill people can acquire by following a specific process. The story that follows outlines how the resources offered here support and reinforce that process in a real-life situation.

“How does a person get started Teaching Personal Finance?” asked Cory Baines one day. Cory worked as a telemarketer in a call center. He and his co-workers, all Millennials with aspirations to move up in the company, were interested in getting some money management knowledge, but weren’t sure where to turn for information. Cory decided to take the lead and learn everything he could about teaching personal finance. What was the process? What were the best practices in the field? By doing a straw poll among his colleagues, Cory found out that they wanted to know how to increase their savings and prepare to invest.

Cory asked his supervisor if there might be an opportunity for teaching personal finance at one of the call center’s monthly staff meetings. The supervisor agreed, because she believed gaining money skills might increase employee productivity. She left it up to Cory to set up the training for the following month’s 90-minute staff meeting. Since Cory just had a moderate amount of time, he opted to start with an overview of the subjects, with the hope that they could go more in-depth at future meetings. He set a goal for them to reach the Skill/Concept Level of Webb’s Depth of Knowledge Theory (Level 2), where they could recall basic information and apply it to solve problems.

Cory had some original goals in mind for Teaching Personal Finance. Now he needed to discover his options for delivering the material. He did some research and found out that he could choose from a variety of pacing and delivery methods. He and his co-workers were all Millennials working in a white-collar profession, so Cory settled on informal live instruction for the meeting, with technology-based components to follow.

Cory now faced a decision regarding how to focus the education – what subjects should he cover while he was teaching personal finance? He had already learned that his colleagues wanted to know more about building up savings and how to prepare for investing. Because he just had 90 minutes for the first meeting, Cory decided he could best achieve his objective of getting them to Webb’s Level 2 by initially focusing only on savings plans.

Who would be responsible for Teaching Personal Finance to the call center employees? Cory needed a highly-qualified educator with demonstrated skill in both pedagogy and managing personal finances. Once again, he weighed in with his supervisor. Turns out she knew one of the other managers in the building was a CFEI (Certified Financial Education Instructor). Cory had solved his problem with ease!

What curriculum should Cory use for Teaching Personal Finance? He was looking for something with practical lessons based on getting participants to take action. He reached that goal by choosing a curriculum that covered the topics according to a flexible schedule and using engaging, interactive activities.

Cory also wanted to report the results of the initial effort toward teaching personal finance. Why? Because he could leverage any success to gain support for future programming. That’s why he had the instructor conduct pre- and post-training quizzes, which uncovered an average improvement of 35% on knowledge about savings among the 14 call center employees who attended the staff meeting. Cory wrote a report of these results and gave it to his supervisor for distribution to the management team.