Tim Ranzetta is the Founder of Next Gen Personal Finance, a non-profit organization to connect educators with free resources and equip students with the knowledge and skills to lead financially successful and fulfilling lives since 2014. Recorded: 1/17/2024 | Run-Time: 48:27 Summary: In today’s episode, Tim updates us on everything going on with Next Gen Personal Finance. You all know I’m a huge proponent of teaching kids personal finance and Tim is as focused on this making this happen as much as anyone. He talks about “Mission 2030,” which is to guarantee every high school student in the US takes at least one semester-long personal finance course by 2030. Sponsor: YCharts enables financial advisors to make smarter investment decisions and better communicate with clients. To start your free trial and be sure to mention “MEB” for 20% off your subscription, click here (new clients only). Comments or suggestions? Interested in sponsoring an episode? Email us Feedback@TheMebFaberShow.com Links from the Episode: Transcript: Meb: Tim, welcome to the show. Tim: Hey, Meb, it’s great to be here. Meb: I should say welcome back, because you were on in 2021. First give our listeners who didn’t hear that episode, we’ll post the first one in the show note links, but tell us a little bit about what you guys do. What’s your mission? Tim: Yeah, just a quick recap about what NextGen Personal Finance does. So, this is a nonprofit I co-founded in 2014, and came after an experience of being a volunteer teacher at a high school East Side College Prep in East Palo Alto, California. When I saw the impact the course had on students, and started to see the ripple effect of parents reaching out to me, I wanted to do something more. And so that led me several years later to start NGPF, and our mission very simply, you can’t unsee it after you’re in a personal finance classroom, and you see the hunger the students have for this information, you can’t help but believe, why aren’t we given this opportunity to every high school in America? So, that’s our North Star. We call it Mission 2030, which is by the year 2030, every high school student, when they cross that graduation stage will have the financial skills they need to thrive in the future. There’s just a tremendous community of educators who we partner with every day to do three things. First of all, we provide them with a curriculum, and what they tell us, and their students tell us is that we help make finance fun. So, what does that mean? It means we’ve got an arcade of games, but they also have worksheets to make sure the learning is taking place, too. We use simulation. We can’t ask them to manage a bank account without giving them experience, and so our bank sim is one of the most popular resources we have. But then we incorporate videos. We have a weekly current events video that we provide along with a quiz game called Fin Cap Friday, and that’s produced by Yanely Espinal from our team. And then we find good articles, we find videos, and we really ensure that it’s current, and relevant to young people. That’s on the curriculum side, and we have everything from a trimester course to a semester course to a full year course to financial algebra as well as a middle school course. We want to offer as many options as possible. The second thing we do is provide professional development, because we know the importance of having a highly qualified, and confident teacher in every classroom, and the only way that can happen is through professional development. And so we have a scalable model where just in the past three to four years, we’ve reached 17,000 teachers who’ve invested on average 25 hours with us. And then the third piece of what we do is advocacy. And we recognized about two, and a half years ago that if we were going to really create change at scale, we were going to need to advocate at the state level working with state policy makers. And I’ll share with you shortly the progress we’ve had there. But just to wrap everything up, again, with our mission, we provide curriculum, we help teachers upskill them with professional development, and then we advocate in order to increase access. Everything we do is at no cost to schools. So, I’ve been very fortunate as an entrepreneur, as well as an investor, and created an endowment which carried us for the first decade. And because of the tremendous growth we see ahead, I’ve been fortunate to bring along some friends of NGPF recently who are also contributing to our mission. Meb: That’s awesome. So, you’ve built the template, which probably took a little while, and you guys are probably at the point now where you’re expanding. So, maybe tell us a little bit about the past couple years, walk us forward from where you were in 21, and then where you guys are here in 24. Tim: Yeah, so since we last spoke in 2021, there’s been a tremendous movement across the nation in expanding access to financial education. So, what does that mean? It means we’ve gone from the number of states requiring a one semester course in personal finance to increasing from eight to 25. And I think what we figured out is the importance of advocating at the state level. And what we’ve discovered is legislators are listening to their constituents, because every time we poll this in a state, we ask voters, “Is this something you believe is important for a high school education?” They tell us 80 to 85% of the time they’ll say, this is really important. And then they’ll also say, “This is urgent.” And so I think legislators are really just responding to what their constituents want. And I would say there’s three elements to the success that we’ve seen in the advocacy work that we do. Number one, there’s a recognized need. 70% of young people are getting this information from social media today. That’s TikTok, Reddit, YouTube. So, if we’re not providing that foundational course in personal finance, they’re not able to develop those critical thinking skills to determine what’s good advice versus bad. The second is demand, which I’ve already alluded to. This is coming from students. This is coming from parents, and teachers, and school boards, and administrators who are saying, if we’re really serious about preparing young people for the 21st century, this is the language that all students will need to understand the language of money, and how to manage it. And then I think the third piece, which is absolutely critical, is the question of, well, one of the real hallmarks of education in the US is local control. So, how do you manage this requirement while also allowing local districts to make decisions? And so what we’ve seen is flexibility at the local level on how this gets implemented. And so that ranges from who can teach the course, and obviously, professional development is a key part to ensure that they’re ready to teach the course what curriculum to use, and that has to be aligned with whatever state is in place. And the good news is there’s a standardization around what should be taught in a personal finance class, and the last is where it fits within graduation requirements. We’re not talking about adding a graduation requirement, we’re talking about where it fits best. Maybe it’s taking it out of the elective pool, because there are a lot of choices that young people have, or maybe it’s to count it as a math class, or an additional social studies class. So, there’s all sorts of options, and I think what states have done is really incorporate it into their existing requirements. Meb: Where’s our local state Cali Stan? Tim: So, again, as I’ve mentioned, we’ve seen this tremendous wave of this movement towards financial education increasing from eight to 25 states just in the last two, and a half years. Unfortunately in the state of California, which considers itself a leader in so many ways has fallen behind, and it’s really a disservice to the students here in California, because in…
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