I suppose this was the point @tsbna44 was making earlier.
In case anyone missed it–“Total Money Makeover” is a basic economic plan. It’s step by step starting with an “emergency fund”–for basic car/home repairs that you know will derail your life. All my kids, younger members of firm and friends kids were gifted a copy.
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Book? Podcast? Website?
Dave Ramsey’s “Total Money Makeover”. Book. He’s written several but that particular one is what has the nuts and bolts of money management. We followed so many of his steps naturally. The “emergency fund” in our case was gifted by my parents when we were married. Huge gift of security.
The main gist is how to get OUT of debt and STAY out of debt. And the plan to get there.
You can disagree with his religion, you can disagree with certain aspects–but it’s difficult to disagree with success.
And he has a podcast geared to particular situations and his website sells his books, has advice.
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I may be mistaken, my understanding is that it’s basically the secular version of Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace. We facilitated two groups through the latter at our church.
We do not follow all of his principles - but pick and choose among them.
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I think the “pick and choose” success probably depends on where you start in needing help with financial matters.
He also has a program that can be incorporated into high schools for financial education. Sounds like he has a “financial peace” type program that is more geared for high school students just to teach financial literacy.
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Any chance he wants to pivot within the same field? I know someone with a masters in geology and got into hydrology and environmental consulting and makes 7 figures. Who would have thought? But there is a lot of demand for geologists in insurance and land development.
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As long as they are healthy, happy and gainfully employed, you’ve no real reason to worry. They don’t have to be wealthy, successful and married with kids.
Being a parent, one always has some sort of anxiety about what could go wrong and what should be going better. Its natural but unproductive and not good for your health.
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NJ has a requirement:
9.1 Personal Financial Literacy.
My only complaint is that it is offered too soon (IMO). My kids both took it as a 9th grade elective. I think it would be more useful in 12th grade, once they had part time jobs, expenses they were responsible for and were beginning to contemplate student loans.
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And also timed so that they have seen exponential functions in math before the personal finance course gets to compound interest.
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My D learned about compound interest at age 5. No need for exponential functions to learn that investing your money is a good idea.
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Agree. Or use those examples more in the math textbooks.
I looked at the textbook that was part of my kids’ home and careers requirement in middle school. It covered a lot of good stuff including the basics of money management, how check accounts work etc. but they aren’t ready to hear it at that point in their life.
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Not necessarily too young.
I think the concepts of financial literacy are like many life topics - they need to be taught over and over again at age appropriate levels with increasing levels of complexity.
Just as one basic example: I can’t recall at what age we started giving ds an allowance. It was $1 per week. Somewhere along the way, I had read to give your child their $1 in dimes. This made it easy to teach putting amounts into different buckets (saving, giving, spending) easy to understand. When they wanted to purchase a specific something, you could introduce the concept of a designated savings fund outside of regular savings. Calculate how long it would be before it could be purchased, etc.
As the child ages, the basic concepts of budgeting, saving, investing, etc can be expanded upon.
Financial literacy is not a one and done lesson.
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In Boy Scouts, one of the badges yo7 have to earn for Eagle rank requires financial literacy education. One of the moms was an economics professor and taught the kids. They also covered the topic in health/PE in 9th grade at private school. I agree it’s not a one and done. I’m sad so many adults have such low financial literacy.
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My DS got a degree in Civil engineering and worked for a consulting firm, then a large multinational mining/fossil fuels organization. He soon realized he was surrounded by unhappy employees and he hated his job. He sucked it up, saved like crazy and took the prerequisites to go back to school for PT. He and his wife were able to live on her salary while he attended a public 3-year program to get his Doctor of Physical Therapy degree, and he graduated a few years ago, debt free. Many of his coworkers were not as fortunate, and have large loans to pay off, which is difficult give salaries for PTs.
He now earns about half what he would have if he continued in his former field, but he doesn’t regret the career change in terms of job satisfaction. Now that he has a child, I believe he misses the compensation a bit, but overall, is happy with his choices. Luckily, he learned to be fairly frugal early on in life.
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Does his city not have opportunities for PTs to do private one on one sessions? Now that we are middle aged, we see a PT one on one every now and then (she comes to our home). Her rates are ASTRONOMICAL (for 3 hours of work she makes what a first year NYC public school teacher makes per week).
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Our PT opted to buy a 2 story home and operate her PT practice out of the bottom floor while living in the top floor. This way, she can better manage her overhead. She has many private pay patients @$100/hr that are long term patients. She and her coworkers have as many patients as they can handle.
I’m sure it may not pay as much as some other fields but she and her coworkers seem happy and improve lives.
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As a PT in the NYC area you can work for Early Intervention and make a decent hourly rate doing home and daycare visits. The rate depends on the agency.
You won’t be “rich,” but you can make a good salary if you see 6-7 children a day. You are also not limited to school days and hours, so you can work Sundays (for example) if you need a day off during the week.
I did this for 15 years (not in PT).
On another note, my D pulled out of a grad program before starting because she realized her heart was elsewhere. She is now applying to a different field (the one she loves) and could not be happier. The starting salary is lower, and it’s fine with me!
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OK, this is kind of off-topic for this thread, but it sounds like a few of you use PTs. I had no idea this was a thing. What do they do for you? And maybe this is on topic, because it helps us think outside the box on things we/our kids could be doing to make money.
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