On Wednesday, a friend and I hosted 30 kids ranging from age 7 to 13 for Financial Literacy session I. Parents had drinks and pizza in the adjacent room. We kept it fun and highly interactive. No grown ups standing in front of a room. The feedback was overwhelming — the kids not only learned but had a blast.
You can do this for your kids’ friend groups too.
I’d describe it as “Kiyosaki without the brainworms”:
🐖Financial Literacy #1: Savings & Compounding (lesson plan)
A summary of the flow:
Start
- why we need money —>
- why we need savings —>
- how do you get money —>
- The floor and ceiling on savings (your savings don’t start until you cover your costs while savings from wages are capped by the number of hours in a day) —>
- how to increase your savings rate (earn more per hour — even when your sleeping via investing or business ownership) —>
- how compounding grows your savings
End
If you seriously decide to do this in your community, I’m happy to offer tips.
A few canned ones:
- One tricky thing was the wide 7-13 age range. Littles run out of gas by 7:30pm and fractions are hard or inaccessible to most…but the 9+ group loved the compounding riddles. When I asked who wanted paper to do a math problem I didn’t expect to get mobbed. Something I learn over and over — give kids credit. They want to be stimulated.
- We had prizes for right answers and some kids were so on point we had to adlib some timed questions to cull the herd because we didn’t have enough prizes.
- No standing in front of the room. Get on their level. Silly is good but be quick to shut down “bottle flipping” distractions or any intra-group condescension. You are trying your best to meet every kid where they are. Also, not all kids are comfortable speaking up, it’s on you to make the environment inclusive the best to your ability as opposed to getting carried away with the energy of the dominants (much of that energy is insecure competitiveness that kids are understandably still navigating — but then again, you’ve certainly met adults wearing the same masks. They’ve just hardened into a “personality”).
- We opened the discussion of compounding with this1. You deposit $100 at 10% interest. You pocket the interest at the end of each year. Repeat for 3 years
2. You don’t remove any money until 3 years elapses.
How much do you end up with in each case?
- For the more mathy questions we’d let them work out the questions on paper and work in groups if they wanted.
- It took 75 minutes to do the whole lesson.