Bankruptcy

Financial Education: Money Talk Hits a Sore Spot

By Nathalie Martin

Money is a touchy subject. No matter how much you try to make discussions about how to preserve it, how much importance to place on it, etc, value neutral and nonjudgmental, people have issues.

I spend most of my free time these days trying to keep people off economic death row. While some of this work involves reviving a workable bankruptcy system, much more relates to prevention through financial education. I also believe that any financial education class must be very carefully crafted to fit the specific audience. Age and income are huge variables, so you can?t just teach a cookie cutter curriculum.

I teach a two-day financial literacy class to UNM undergrads and law students, and would love to share the details with anyone out there who is interested. Here is a start: http://lawschool.unm.edu/faculty/martin/fl-1.php.  Karen Gross gave me the idea and I have built on it. But, this year I was asked to do one hour on the topic for first year students, in part because they are in such terrible financial condition. Because the class in which this is taught is comprised of 9 sub-sections, I had the pleasure of having eight of my colleagues attend this class. We started with basic compounding interest hypos, including one exercise in which one person gave up one $4.50 latte a day for 10 years, saved, $18,000, invested it at 8% and held it for 30 years, ending up with over $150,000! We then saw the math moving in the other direction with credit card debts, learned a bit about credit reporting and scoring, a bit about bad car deals, and then broke up into groups to think of ways to economize. The students enjoyed this last part, even if some of the suggestions (selling plasma, getting paid to be in drug tests, finding a sugar mama/daddy,  or giving up long-distance relationships), were a bit extreme.

Students enjoyed the class but many of my colleagues had issues. "Wasn't it unfair to tell students they could reasonably expect to earn 8% on investments?" Um, no. "Don?t they need to use credit cards to build credit?" Uh?.not really, no. "What is wrong with a car lease if you?ll be getting a new car every two years anyway?" "And expensive car payments? So what? Why does the total cost of interest matter if on a cash flow basis, you are fine. Isn?t it all about the cash flow?" These last two are stumpers all right. I guess I am both greedier and simpler than most people. I like to drive it till it dies, earn interest, not pay interest, etc.

This does tell you though that it is hard to listen to advice about money that is geared to a different crowd. Cash flow is the issue if retirement is fully funded and the kids are out of college. Otherwise, I can't imagine how a little extra dough lying around could be a bad thing?

Comments, anyone? What information would be useful in a class like this?

Full post as published by Credit Slips on January 08, 2008 (boomark / email).