To be perfectly blunt, I’m a fairly educated 27-year-old who tries to be responsible, but my finances (until very recently) have been disastrous. During the past five years since I graduated college and started teaching, I have put a lot of thought into why I seem unable to pull my financial life together. I’ve sought help from friends that seem to have a better grip on their own finances, which helped some…but nothing ever made everything click.

I don’t want to see my students face the same struggles, at least without trying to help in some way.

Everything that was put in front of me in school I worked hard at and learned well. I use skills that I learned during all levels of my education to this day. But no one ever put financial instruction in front of me.

It turns out, only 4 states in the nation require at least a one-semester financial literacy course for graduation. North Carolina is not one of those states. It is one of the twenty states that attempts to build financial literacy into other subjects’ curricula. [Note: That means more than half of the states have NO required financial literacy. NONE.]

My goal is to arm myself with knowledge and skills I can pass on. It is to develop a curriculum that gets at the real-world needs of soon-to-be-graduates and prepares them for a piece of their adult lives that often goes overlooked in schools.

In researching what financial literacy tools already exist, I stumbled across this quote from #finlit blogger Brian Page:

We can’t claim to be preparing students for the 21st century if we are not providing them with 21st-century survival skills.

He hit the nail on the head.

My goal as an educator is to arm my students with the tools they need to live successful lives once they leave the hallowed, sheltered (though moldy) halls of the school for the big, bad, real world. Basic financial competence is one of the most important tools for that future success.