Finding water in the desert is no easy thing. Throughout our nation, students attend 12-16 years of school and leave with zero knowledge about how to manage their own money; a barren financial wasteland with no oasis to be found.
Then this happened. My friend, Tim Ranzetta, a former tech entrepreneur from California decided to do something. He started by volunteering to teach a personal finance course in Palo Alto at a local high school. It became much, much, more.
In 2014, he founded Next Gen Personal Finance as a non-profit organization. Its purpose is to give teachers the tools to save the financial lives of their students. The site is filled with real time and ready-to-use resources that ANY teacher can understand and implement.
Best of all, it’s absolutely FREE. Tim has funded it through an endowment he established.
Regarding money matters, teachers sometimes know less than their students. Next Gen has a solution for this embarrassing problem.
Next Gen provides easily accessible personal development which includes webinars, events, and a summer institute.
On the site there is a curriculum section. This includes everything from full semester material to smaller seminars. Student assessments are part of the package. Teachers can incorporate this invaluable subject matter into their classrooms in a customized manner; spending as much or as little time on it as they like.
More importantly, they have a user-friendly guide to assist them.
The site also includes podcasts, surveys, blogs and contests under its community section. The resources section is packed with all kinds of cool stuff, which includes activities, video libraries, case studies, projects and a question of the day.
If teachers just did this one activity, terrific discussions on things like paying for college, investing, banking, credit and saving could become an ingrained part of each day’s lesson.
I cannot say enough about Tim and what he is doing for public education for students all around the country. He is a true disruptor in a field that is begging for disruption: Public Education.
It does not stop here. Tim is also a big believer in our program to stop the financial exploitation of public school teachers in their 403(b) retirement plans. I recently did a podcast with him on this subject.
Fair warning to annuity peddlers: Tim is working on a solution that will be their worst nightmare; more to come on this.
Changing the world has to start somewhere. Next Gen Personal Finance is a great place to start.
YOU can be a hero for more than one day.
