Today at TILE we talked about some new ways in which parents, educators, and the folks in Washington D.C. are encouraging young people to learn about finance. For example, the Department of Education and Department of the Treasury just launched the National Financial Capability Challenge. Remember stretching, crunching, and jogging your way through the Presidential Physical Fitness Test? Well this program is kind of like that, except it’s designed to help high school students learn enough about personal finance take control of their financial futures. It challenges high school teachers and other educators to teach the basics of personal finance to their students, and rewards students, educators, schools, and states for their participation and their success. The goal is for 1 million students to take the Challenge Exam before mid-April. In order to reach that goal, they are encouraging educators to add financial education to their curriculum now (there are plenty of resources for educators on challenge.treas.gov), and just bring more attention to this often-neglected topic.

At TILE, we think this is great! Because we want to support this project and encourage everyone to find a way to participate (teach a class, encourage your teachers to enroll, or be supportive in your school), here are a few thoughts/ideas on how to TILEize the curriculum and make it even better:

- Connect finance to how you live your life. If you are an educator, try to focus on more than just definitions – young people learn the most when they can connect a concept with their everyday lives (if not everyday technology). For example, rather than just defining interest, give real life examples so that they can see the difference between products and time periods. If you are a student, ask your teacher to “make it real.”

- Ask TILE! In an effort to support the NFCC, we’re offering TILEized definitions and translations to the first 100 students or educators who reach out to us. If a question isn’t understandable or a definition doesn’t make sense, send us an email at ask@tilefinancial.com. We will TILEize it so it is more understandable and doesn’t feel like it comes from a textbook. As a start, we are including five of our “Daily Definitions” at the end of this post.

- Today at TILE. Feel free to go to our site (tilefinancial.com) and search through past blog posts to get ideas, share them with educators/students and supplement the learning. The Today at TILE blog is intended to represent questions and concepts that young adults are interested in – and to talk about them in a tone that’s understandable. And this is just between us… but many adults tell me that they’ve also learned things from reading the blog!

So what does The National Financial Capability Challenge mean for the TILE Community? It means that a broader audience is finally focused on the need to empower young adults with the information they need to make good financial choices in the future. (Which, as you can imagine, we’re really into!) It also reiterates the need for more and better communication among financial institutions, parents, educators and young adults. We encourage everyone to participate, to take the challenge, and to take us along for the ride!

- Amy

As promised, a few definitions we’ve cooked up recently:

• A CD is a Certificate of Deposit, which is basically a savings account with a higher interest rate. In return for the higher rate, you aren’t allowed to touch your money for a set period of time. In general, shorter periods of time (like three months) have lower interest rates, while the longer time periods have much higher ones.
• Debt is an amount owed to a person or organization for funds borrowed. For example, if you were to get a loan to pay for college, you are in debt and owe the bank however much you borrowed plus a pre-determined cost in the form of interest.
• A credit rating is like a grade given to a person, business, or even a country, that says how likely that person is to make payments on a loan as promised. Credit ratings for people are called credit scores and are maintained by credit bureaus like Experian and TransUnion. Credit rating agencies like Moody’s or Standard and Poor’s give ratings to companies and countries that tell investors how safe it is to buy their securities, like bonds or stocks.
• Sallie Mae is slang for the Student Loan Marketing Association, an agency that helps college students get loans.
• A mutual fund is a pool of securities (stocks, bonds, money market instruments, etc.) managed by an investment company or other professional and paid for by investors. Each share of a mutual fund contains a small piece of every different type of security in the fund (so when you buy a share of a mutual fund, you’re really buying a little piece of a stock from Company A, a little piece of a stock from Company B, a little piece of a government bond, and so on).