Beyond Personal Finance for Teens (review)
Personal finance for teens doesn’t need to be boring. Find out how to make financial literacy for teens more interesting in this post.
Personal finance can be a complicated topic for adults, let alone teens. It’s often dry, dull, and lacks an element of relatability when it comes to teaching our homeschooled teens how to understand the concepts of financial literacy.
And yet, it’s an important life skill that we shouldn’t ignore. After all, we all want our kids to be successful adults, right? Like it or not, managing money throughout the course of their lifetime is a big part of that.
Guess what? I’ve recently discovered a curriculum that helps you navigate financial literacy topics with your teens and makes it totally relatable and interactive for them! It’s called Beyond Personal Finance.
Beyond Personal Finance for Teens
Beyond Personal Finance for teens not only explains the concepts, it allows the students to experience the application of those concepts themselves through the course.
This is accomplished through 3 units with a total of 20 lessons, representing 20 years in the life of the student. From ages 22-42 within the course lessons, teens learn how to plan and budget for real life events like college/career, marriage, parenthood, and eventually retirement.
The course is presented in an online portal with video lessons along with a companion workbook. Students fill out a form to estimate their earnings and expenses throughout each “year” (lesson) of the course as they progress.
If I had to sum up this course in a just a few words, I would say thorough, creative, interactive, and practical.
When I think back on my own education experience, the only course I had that really had anything to do with finance was a basic economics class in college. Seriously, I was not prepared for adulting by anything I learned in my public school experience.
Beyond Personal Finance is the opportunity I needed to introduce these topics to my daughters so that they would be more prepared than I ever was! It’s a good feeling to find something like this that will give them practical life skills that I know will serve them well as responsible adults.
There are even lessons on choosing a spouse and the financial dangers of divorce, something I’ve never really seen addressed in a personal finance course before. This emphasizes that life is about making choices, so let’s make the best choices we can!
What do teens learn in Beyond Personal Finance?
Unit 1 lessons included are:
- Colleges & Careers
- Budgeting
- Car Purchase
- Apartment Rental
- Checkpoint
Unit 2 lessons included are:
- Credit Cards
- Interest
- Paychecks
- House Purchase
- Insurance
- Review
- Checkpoint
Unit 3 lessons included are:
- Charitable Giving
- Investments
- Business Basics
- Reconciliations
- Income Tax
- Review
- Checkpoint
- Retirement
There are checkpoints and reviews along the way that give teens the chance to evaluate their progress and make changes to income/expenses if necessary. This will help them adjust their savings and try to avoid debt.
About the Instructor behind Beyond Personal Finance
Beyond Personal Finance was created by accountant and homeschool mom, Charla McKinley. She talks about the motivation behind creating this course for homeschooled teens:
I call myself The Artisan of Adulting because I write and speak to parents to help them raise responsible and ready adults. One of the biggest ways to get teens ready for the real world is to show him what his financial future will look like.
My husband and I learned our money lessons the hard way: high interest rates, late payment penalties, new car depreciation and so much more. I wanted something different for my son but he felt like my advice was out of touch with today’s realities. So I sat down and created Beyond Personal Finance to show him how quickly his choices could get him in trouble.
The class begins with the students choosing a career for their future self. From there I teach the real life lessons adults face from ages 22-42. After each lesson, the student has a choice to make (car, apartment, spouse, insurance, house, investment and much more) and they build a budget based on those choices so they can see first hand if they are able to afford the future they dream of.
I taught it to my son and his friends in 2014 and the parents begged me to teach it again to their other children. For several more years, I was teaching based on local word of mouth demand. The change I saw in my son and heard about from other parents inspired me to share the class nationwide. Since launching a self paced course nationwide in 2019, I have sold this curriculum to over 900 students and the grateful feedback from parents is very humbling.
The class is different because it does not lecture teens about making wise choices. Instead, I let them make their own choices and let the numbers teach the lesson. For example, I had a student who could not decide between a career as a composer or an engineer. I encouraged him to make his initial budget both ways to see how the results played out. He did not get beyond Lesson 2 without realizing that a career as an engineer would afford him more choices than a career as a composer. This is not to say that being a composer is a bad thing, but the numbers helped him see that working as an engineer while composing music on the nights and weekends was a path to a more secure financial future. His budget as a full time composer left him in debt unless he wanted to move back in with his parents. This was not the life he dreamed of.
I really appreciate the inspiration behind this course. It definitely makes a difference in the quality of the course because it’s obvious that the instructor has a personal investment in the topic.
Try Beyond Personal Finance for Teens
Beyond Personal Finance offers a unique, hands-on approach to financial literacy that any teen would benefit from learning.
Charla McKinley makes the topic approachable and relatable, something that both homeschool parents and teens will appreciate.
Sign up today for Beyond Personal Finance self-paced individual course or the self-paced group course with your homeschool co-op or group.
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