A Financial Literacy Program for Your Child
With personal bankruptcies and credit card debt increasing while retirement savings are decreasing among Americans, the need to teach financial literacy to teenagers in high schools and youth-focused community organizations is critical. For teachers, the challenge is to provide instruction on a topic that traditionally has not been included in high school curricula, and to locate high quality classroom material about personal finance.
Fortunately, there is an excellent program—the National Endowment for Financial Education® High School Financial Planning Program® (NEFE® HSFPP)—that can help high schools and community organizations teach your child to plan and achieve their financial goals. The program and materials are FREE, easy to implement and use.
Getting a Program Started
Not every school or community organization knows about the HSFPP. You can help spread the word by telling your school or community group about the program and its advantages. To assist you in doing this, NEFE® can send you information kits about the program so that you can share the material with local school administrators, teachers, or curriculum coordinators. Each kit includes a full student guide, sample pages of the instructor's manual, brochure, bookmark and other information.
Click here to order an Information Kit.
You also can contact one or both of the following HSFPP representatives:
To find your county’s Cooperative Extension Service, click here.
To find a Credit Union near you, click visit www.creditunionsforyou.com.
A Program About Managing Money that Turns Learning Into Action!
The NEFE® HSFPP enables students to convert what they learn into real actions that result in positive habits. The focus is on the students, so the curriculum is not about creating a budget, but about your child creating his or her budget, his or her financial plan, his or her savings plan, his or her investing plan. The NEFE® HSFPP personalizes learning so that your teenager can immediately begin to apply learned skills in his or her own life.
The NEFE® HSFPP was designed and developed around a special type of education called performance-based learning. With performance-based learning, students take what they learn and apply it directly in the course of each unit. Carefully designed exercises and activities move students step-by-step toward each of the program’s seven core competencies:
- Creating their own financial plan
- Creating their own budget
- Proposing a personal saving and investing plan
- Selecting strategies to use in handling credit and managing their debt
- Demonstrating how to use various financial services
- Creating a personal insurance plan
- Examining how their choice of career and lifestyle will affect their financial plan
Click here to learn more about the core competencies.
Financial Maturity
People who are financially mature are creditworthy. They are savers. They pay their bills and know how to live on less than they earn. When they have to borrow, they use debt to enhance their creditworthiness and minimize the cost of a loan in the process by shopping for low interest rates and having a plan to pay off the loan.
Financially smart people know how to protect what they have and have chosen a fulfilling career that supports their lifestyle. They know how to get what they want without impeding their ability to achieve short- and long-term goals, such as buying a home, educating their children, and paying for their retirement years.
These are skills that anyone can learn regardless of age. But teens have an advantage - they have time on their side. Teens who start to save early can accumulate startling amounts of money, putting them in a much better position to achieve what they want out of life. Help your child get a head start by informing the high school and youth-focused organizations in your community about the NEFE® HSFPP.
