April kicks off National Financial Literacy Month! Financial Literacy Month is a nationally recognized campaign to promote financial education for students and adults. For teachers, this month is a great opportunity to introduce personal finance topics to students and prepare them for their financial futures. To bring financial education into the classroom, teachers can leverage free resources from TCI’s Personal Finance Toolkit.
TCI’s Personal Finance Toolkit
From budgeting to using credit wisely, teachers can prepare their students for their financial futures with TCI’s Personal Finance Toolkit. The toolkit provides flexible, easy-to-use resources that will help your students assess their financial literacy, develop essential financial skills, and begin to plan their finances. Free resources from the toolkit are available for all teachers:
- Identifying Job Skills. Use the Job Skills Tool to introduce strategies for identifying and leveraging skills in the job market. The tool includes a worksheet for students to analyze an inventory of job skills and reflect on their top skills and attributes.
- Creating a Monthly Budget. Students can understand the whys and hows of creating a budget with the Monthly Budget Tool. By following the six steps in the tool, students create a budget for themselves and evaluate how well they did each month.
- Using a Credit Card Responsibly. Students may be getting a credit card for the first time and need to understand how to use it wisely. The Credit Card Tool introduces students to the ins and outs of credit and how to be savvy credit card users.
Get access to these tools and more from TCI’s free lessons for National Financial Literacy Month.
The State of Financial Literacy Education
Understanding the fundamentals of taxes, budgeting, and credit can help people get out of debt and save up for emergencies and retirement. In a 2017 survey, only 23 percent of kids reported that their parents talked with them about finances frequently. Moreover, a 2018 report by the Federal Reserve finds that a quarter of non-retired adults had no retirement savings or pension. The same report also states that on average respondents could only answer 60 percent of financial literacy questions correctly.
The movement for financial literacy education in schools is gaining support. A survey from Credit Karma/Qualtrics found that 63 percent of participants believe that personal finance should be taught in schools. Eleven states now require high school students to take a personal finance course to graduate. According to Next Gen Personal Finance (NGPF), 54 financial education bills are still pending in 26 states.
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