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Thought Prompts (from Civically Engaged Classrooms) 

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Thought Prompts (from Civically Engaged Classrooms) 

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0:45- 2:04

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Financial Literacy - A Beginners Guide to Financial Education

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Financial Literacy and the Social Media Generation

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Financial Literacy and the Social Media Generation

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Financial Literacy & The Social Media Generation | Nelson Soh | TEDxGrandviewHeights

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The Ultimate Guide to Financial Literacy

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The Ultimate Guide to Financial Literacy

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The Ultimate Guide to Financial Literacy for Adults

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Investopedia rounds up the best educational content for students, teachers, and anyone else interested in learning personal finance and investing.

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The Simple Path To Financial Independence | Ryan Sterling | TEDxFarmingdale

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Financial literacy is a growing challenge as developing countries experience an increased access to financial services. Financial access, formerly a serious problem in developing countries, is rapidly being achieved as geographic, technological, and national barriers are eliminated. Mobile phone technology, urbanization, the growth of microfinance, and the prevalence of remittances all ensure that even poor, rural populations can easily access a bank account from a mobile phone or Internet connection. Encouraging financial participation and providing access without creating literacy programs will create problems for new bank account holders who do not understand how to invest and budget their savings. Increasing financial literacy in developing countries is a public good and a potential function of foreign assistance in partnership with financial service companies, civil society, educators, and financial regulators.

Universal access to finance will be a possibility within the next decade. The surge in new bank account holders and financial consumers will create new responsibilities for regulators, educators, and donors as financial literacy rates remain low.

Financial literacy is defined as the ability to understand and execute matters of personal finance, including basic numeracy, interest compounding, inflation, and risk diversification. Someone who is financially literate understands compound savings rates, changes in value of money over time, mechanics of credit and debt, and how these various economic tools affect their choices. Those who are not financially literate are unable to make informed choices about personal finances.

The financial crisis in 2009 brought the need for increased financial literacy to the world's attention. Even developed countries, the crisis proved, suffer from low levels of financial literacy, which can have a powerful impact on both local and global economies. Globally, financial literacy levels range from 13 percent to 71 percent, with a loose correlation between higher economic development and higher literacy rates.

In 2014, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) published the findings of their financial literacy test. In their study of over 500,000 15-year-old students in 65 different countries, they found that students with a higher socioeconomic status perform better on a test of basic financial literacy than those with poorer families. In several countries, students who hold a bank account perform better than those who do not, all else equal.

Financial literacy is generally much lower among poorer populations. In the McGraw Hill Financial report Financial Literacy Around the World, the countries with the highest rates of financial literacy are Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, where at least 65 percent of adults are financially literate. Major emerging economies, like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) experience only 28 percent literacy among adults on average.

A broader definition of financial literacy, expanded to include understanding the use and meaning of data and trends, proves an ongoing challenge for the developed world. The United States has struggled with deficient levels of financial literacy, as was highlighted by the recent financial crisis, and currently experiences only 57 percent literacy among adults.

Some examples of financial literacy programs include inclusion and literacy initiatives at both Visa and MasterCard, which encourage basic understanding of transactions, loans, and interest rates to make individuals smarter about money management. The Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy is a coalition of organizations including banks, insurance providers, and government entities that support financial literacy for children in the United States.

The World Bank launched a Consumer Protection and Financial Literacy program in 2010, looking at both sides of the financial literacy issue-transparency requirements of financial institutions and the literacy rate of consumers. While consumer protection laws, supervisory structures, and oversight boards exist in the vast majority of the 114 countries the World Bank studied, the extent to which these structures advocate for consumers' literacy is questionable. Accion, a microfinance and investment firm, has been working on financial literacy and basic business training since 1995.

As the McGraw Hill Financial report shows, teaching financial literacy in schools encourages students to think critically about financial needs versus wants, smart ways to save their money, and how to take charge of their future by becoming financially independent. While financial literacy is seen as a developed world problem, urbanization, the growing middle class, and expanding financial access means that individuals are more empowered to make financial choices and need to be better prepared for the consequences of those choices.
Daniel F. Runde holds the Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis and directs the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Erin Nealer is a research assistant with the CSIS Project on U.S. Leadership in Development. Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s). © 2015 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved. This Commentary is informed by the discussion at the CSIS Schreyer Chair Dinner on Finance & Development, which discussed financial literacy challenges and was led by Daniel F. Runde, director of the Project on Prosperity and Development and William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis at CSIS.
Further reading:

Financial Literacy Around the World: Insights from the Standard & Poor's Ratings Services Global Financial Literacy Survey (pdf)

PISA 2012 Results: Students and Money - Financial Literacy Skills for the 21st Century , Volume VI (pdf)

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Financial Literacy: Challenges and Opportunities

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Financial literacy is a growing challenge as developing countries experience an increased access to financial services. Financial access, formerly a serious problem in developing countries, is rapidly being achieved as geographic, technological, and national barriers are eliminated.

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This is the blog post that shows you how to be wealthy enough to retire in ten years.

Here at Mr. Money Mustache, we talk about all sorts of fancy stuff like investment fundamentals, lifestyle changes that save money, entrepreneurial ideas that help you make money, and philosophy that allows you to make these changes a positive thing instead of a sacrifice.

In addition, the Internet presents us with retirement calculators, competing opinions from a million financial advisors and financial doomsayers, unpredictable inflation, and a wide distribution of income and spending patterns between readers.

I reviewed my own path to age-30 retirement in " A brief History of the 'Stash", then I did a hypothetical calculation using two average teacher salaries to show how long it would take them to retire in " The Race to Retirement - Revisited ".

Because of this torrent of information, people tend to become overwhelmed and say things like,
"Yeah, good for you Mr. Money Mustache, but how can I possibly know when I'll have enough to retire myself, with a completely different lifestyle?"
Well, I have a surprise for you. It turns out that when it boils right down to it, your time to reach retirement depends on only one factor:
Your savings rate, as a percentage of your take-home pay
If you want to break it down just a bit further, your savings rate is determined entirely by these two things:
How much you take home each year How much you can live on
While the numbers themselves are quite intuitive and easy to figure out, the relationship between these two numbers is a bit surprising.

If you are spending 100% (or more) of your income, you will never be prepared to retire, unless someone else is doing the saving for you (wealthy parents, social security, pension fund, etc.). So your work career will be Infinite.

If you are spending 0% of your income (you live for free somehow), and can maintain this after retirement, you can retire right now. So your working career can be Zero.

In between, there are some very interesting considerations. As soon as you start saving and investing your money, it starts earning money all by itself. Then the earnings on those earnings start earning their own money. It can quickly become a runaway exponential snowball of income.

As soon as this income is enough to pay for your living expenses, while leaving enough of the gains invested each year to keep up with inflation, you are ready to retire.

If you drew this "savings rate" story into a graph, it would not be a straight line, it would be nice curved exponential graph, like this:

If you save a reasonable percentage of your take-home pay, like 50%, and live on the remaining 50%, you'll be Ready to Rock (aka "financially independent") in a reasonable number of years - about 16 according to this chart and a more detailed spreadsheet* I just made for myself to re-create the equation that generated the graph.

So let's take the graph above and make it even simpler. I'll make some conservative assumptions for you, and you can just focus on saving the biggest percentage of your take-home pay that you can. The table below will tell you a nice ballpark figure of how many years it will take you to become financially independent.
Assumptions:

You can earn 5% investment returns after inflation during your saving years

You'll live off of the "4% safe withdrawal rate " after retirement, with some flexibility in your spending during recessions.

You want your 'Stash to last forever, you'll only be touching the gains, since this income may be sustaining you for seventy years or so. Just think of this assumption as a nice generous Safety Margin.

Here's how many years you will have to work for a range of possible savings rates, starting from a net worth of zero:

It's quite amazing, especially at the less Mustachian end of the spectrum. A middle-class family with a 50k take-home pay who saves 10% of their income ($5k) is actually better than average these days. But unfortunately, "better than average" is still pretty bad, since they are on track for having to work for 51 years.

But simply cutting cable TV and a few lattes would instantly boost their savings to 15%, allowing them to retire 8 years earlier!! Are cable TV and Starbucks worth having two income earners each work an extra eight years for???

The most important thing to note is that cutting your spending rate is much more powerful than increasing your income. The reason is that every permanent drop in your spending has a double effect:

it increases the amount of money you have left over to save each month

and it permanently decreases the amount you'll need every month for the rest of your life

So your lifetime passive income goes up due to having a larger investment nest egg, and it more easily meets your needs, because you've developed more skill at living efficiently and thus you need less.

If want to retire within 10 years, the formula is right there in front of you - simply live on 35% of your take-home pay**, which is approximately what I did without even realizing it during my own younger years. The only reason Mustachians will remain a rare breed, is because this article will never appear in USA Today. (Or if it does, people will be too busy complaining about how it can't be done, rather than figuring out how to do it)

So keep reading, since this blog is all about making financial independence happen!
An MMM-Recommended Bonus as of August 2020:

If you have a mortgage or student loans, the current lowest interest rates in history (like mortgages for 2.9%!) could provide you with a pretty big head start. Check out Credible.com for surprisingly efficient and user-friendly (and free) comparison of refinancing rates on both home and student loans.

Student loans click here ($300 bonus for MMM readers!)

Mortgages click here
(See their mortgage disclosure here)
note - Credible has now joined the short list of approved MMM affiliates, see more info here if you are curious how I handle them.
*If you want to play with the (rather basic) spreadsheet I made to generate this table, you can download it in OpenOffice format (.ods) here: Retirement Savings vs. Years

** definition of take-home pay: gross income minus all taxes. Remember to add back in any 401k or other savings deductions to the paycheck you see, since these are really part of what you are "taking home" - you just happen to be saving it automatically.

Note on how to track spending: we do almost all spending using the best rewards credit card I can get my hands on, and the rest by automated bank debit (checks or cash only for things that strictly require it, like Craigslist purchases). So at the end of the year just need to review the online statements for card and bank.

Recently this has been revolutionized by apps like Personal Capital or Mint.com. Same basic idea, but it lets me see up-to-the-minute spending that is automatically categorized into nice pie charts, etc. If a figure looks surprisingly high, you can click in to see the detailed transactions in the various accounts that were added together to make that category. Quite futuristic.
(note that this blog earns affiliate income from some companies mentioned herein - see my affiliates policy)

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The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement

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This is the blog post that shows you how to be wealthy enough to retire in ten years. Here at Mr. Money Mustache, we talk about all sorts of fancy stuff like investment fundamentals, lifestyle changes that save money, entrepreneurial ideas that help you make money, and philosophy that allows you to make these changes a positive thing instead of a sacrifice.

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1:48 - 13:56

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You know you should start investing, but do you know the best way to get started? In the first episode of a three-part deep dive into investing, hosts Sean Pyles and Alana Benson explore how to get into the investing mindset, do a bit of myth-busting around investing and discuss how to actually get started.
To send the Nerds your money questions, call or text the Nerd hotline at 901-730-6373 or email podcast@nerdwallet.com.

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‎NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast: Nerdy Deep Dives: Investing, Part 1 on Apple Podcasts

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You know you should start investing, but do you know the best way to get started? In the first episode of a three-part deep dive into investing, hosts Sean Pyles and Alana Benson explore how to get into the investing mindset, do a bit of myth-busting around investing and discuss how to actually get...

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Author and financial journalist Andrew Hallam joined us from Menton, France for this episode.
Andrew Hallam is an international bestselling author and one of the world's most prolific financial wellness speakers. He has given hundreds of talks in over 30 different countries on financial wellness, sound investing, and life satisfaction. He had built a million-dollar portfolio on a schoolteacher's salary by the time he was in his late 30s.
As a financial journalist, Andrew has written for numerous international publications, too many to name. He has been interviewed on the radio, multiple podcasts, and TV.
Andrew and his wife are adventurous travelers. They cycled around Europe and Asia on their tandem bike and explored Mexico and Central America in their camper van. Andrew says: "Intelligent investing allows people to buy the only non-renewable resource they'll ever have: time."
Andrew is the internationally bestselling author of Millionaire Teacher and Millionaire Expat. His latest book isBalance: How To Invest and Spend for Happiness, Health, and Wealth.
The guiding question for the episode was "How can international educators best set themselves up for financial success?"
We covered a wide range of topics including advice for those new to international teaching, school retirement benefits, currencies in salaries, investing for non-American expatriates, countries welcoming retiring expatriates, and highlights of Andrew's books.
This episode was recorded on September 27, 2022.
Andrew's Contact Information: Andrew Hallam | Facebook Millionaire Teacher and Expats & International School Educators - Financial Advice

Categories: Finance | Recruiting | Nature of International Schools |

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:
Cost of Living Around the World at Numbeo
Investing Services for Expatriates Plan Vision by Mark Zoril
Music: YouTube. (2022). Acoustic Guitar | Folk | No copyright | 2022❤️. YouTube. Retrieved October 11, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOEmg_6i7jA.
Remember to access the Resources section of our Educators Going Global website for more information.

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2. international teacher finances: an interview with millionaire teacher andrew hallam

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‎Educators Going Global: 2. International Teacher Finances: An Interview with Millionaire Teacher Andrew Hallam on Apple Podcasts

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Author and financial journalist Andrew Hallam joined us from Menton, France for this episode. Andrew Hallam is an international bestselling author and one of the world's most prolific financial wellness speakers. He has given hundreds of talks in over 30 different countries on financial wellness, s...

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https://gflec.org/initiatives/sp-global-finlit-survey/

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Percentage of financial literacy by group

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Percentage of financial literacy by group