K-12 Financial Literacy Curriculum | Ep 191

Danielle, Mandy and Rob join the show to share the newly released pre-K through 12 Financial Independence curriculum. You’ll learn more about the curriculum and how you can implement it into your classroom.

• Danielle, Mandy, and Rob spearheaded the project to build out a Financial Independence curriculum for students in grades K-12. They started with the Pillars of FI concept and then worked backward to break out individual lessons for different grade levels.
• The team had the goal of working within the teacher’s existing day. Instead of adding another stand-alone lesson into their day, the curriculum looks to interweave Financial Independence concepts into other lessons such as math or language development.
• The lessons are not meant to overwhelm the teacher, but to help them bring in the concept from wherever they are at. As a teacher, you will have access to many resources and materials to help pick up the concept from wherever you are at.
• The curriculum is meant to meet the children at the grade level where they are at. Starting at the pre-K level, the concepts are interwoven into storybooks that reach kids at their level. In elementary school, the concepts are woven into math, English, and social studies classes because it is not likely that the grade level could fit in a full-blown personal finance class. In middle school and high school, the teacher has more flexibility and the curriculum becomes more of a standalone lesson instead of something that is woven into an existing topic such as math or English.
• You can access an 18-week semester-long course for high school students. Or you can work from individual lessons and topics that are designed for lower grade levels. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing venture. You can pull out specific lessons that overlap with your existing lesson plans to introduce financial literacy concepts without teaching an entire class on the subject.
• If you are interested in implementing this beyond your classroom, then start by collecting data. Implement the lessons in your classroom and measure the behavioral changes of the students. When you are ready, invite decisionmakers to your classroom to show them what the students are truly learning. Although it may be a slow process, showing results to decisionmakers can help you spread these lessons in your school and beyond.
• The curriculum is completely free for teachers to access. When you sign up, you’ll receive an email orientation that will walk you through the website. You’ll learn how to access and download the lessons that you need. The format is in a Google Doc, so it is easy for everyone to use.

Resources

• K-12 Financial Independence Curriculum

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Table Of Contents

• Meet The Team
• Building A Financial Independence Curriculum
• Working Withing A Teacher’s Day
• Lesson Example
• Implementing This Curriculum
• How To Spread This Curriculum
• How To Find The Curriculum

Meet The Team

Jonathan: All right, everyone’s super excited about this episode.

We’re getting the opportunity to interview the team of educators that are bringing this curriculum to the world. We’ve talked about it on the show. This is a pre-K through 12 financial literacy curriculum. It’s absolutely incredible.

And this team of educators from around the world with a background in personal finance have brought that talent stack together and helped create something that I think really will have that impact on the next generation.

And I’m very excited to introduce them to you and welcome them to the show. Danielle Mendonsa, my wife. Mandy Bert and Rob Phelan. Welcome to the ChooseFI Podcast.

Rob: Thanks for having me, guys.

Danielle: Thanks for having me.

Mandy: Thanks so much for the introduction and I also wanted to give a shout out to the writing teams and the editing teams that worked across all of the grade levels. We had teams of professional educators and also different finance experts come together to really help us take this curriculum across the finish line and give us feedback in terms of making sure that all of the material is accurate and helpful and also really engaging and impactful based on students and really their learning levels and where they are.

Jonathan: All right, so let’s go ahead and hop in here. I’d actually be curious, Dani, if you could… So, Dani, by the way, fun fact, is my wife. And this is the second time that you’ve been on the show. And it’s been a fair amount of time since our first pass. We recorded an episode with you and Laura, Brad’s wife, and we all survived. It was fun. It was a great time. It was well-received.

But now, a couple of years later, it’s cool to have this opportunity to talk about it in the context of this curriculum and that’s really the setup for this.

You saw your husband working on ChooseFI and trying to share this idea that obviously inspired me, inspired Brad. What was it that made you think you could take your skill set and help with this facet that I have no competence in? The ability to create a curriculum, it’s different than talking about the pillars of FI. It’s just a completely different conversation. What made you excited about taking this on?

Danielle: So, I guess twofold. First I did have the… I laugh, I did sit and hear every conversation whilst I was feeding one of our littles. So, we have two kids under three and so I have listened to a lot of conversations.

But then, also, as I’m listening to it, hearing a passion coming from upstairs, realizing that we had a similar passion. And then quickly finding a team that had a similar of passion, as well, was exciting.

Being able to use a teaching skill set but also interweave it with financial literacy concepts was something that I was really excited about, particularly as when I was at my school before staying home with the kids. We did do a classroom economy and I got my feet wet with that and that’s where my passion started.

So, I was really excited to be able to branch out and think, “Okay, my skillset is K through 12. I’m K through six, an elementary teaching degree. I got my master’s in curriculum instruction and how can I weave those and then find two other people that are as passionate?”

And I do say two other people that are as passionate because the hours that we have put in have been fun. The last 18 to 20 months have definitely been fun, haven’t they, Mandy and Rob?

Jonathan: Well, that’s great. That set me up perfectly. Rob, I want to bring you into this, as well. But I want to talk to Mandy just for a second because I know when you joined the team, I think that was actually in early 2019. I’m curious, what did you feel like you were coming into and what was there and where has it gone over the intervening 12 months?

Mandy: It was the absolute best thing to step into. I had heard about the opportunity and I thought, “Is this real?” Something that I’m personally so interested in and then the teaching aspect that I love.

But Dani and Rob totally had the setup there all for me. They were actually headed out on their leaves when I got a chance to step in. So, it was really fun to just get the curriculum over the finish line and then work with a team of editors and then just see where we’re headed with the site and all that.

Jonathan: Yeah. So, we’re going to actually talk about the site here in a second. But, Rob, to weave you into this conversation, as well, this was something… So, when you heard, I think you heard us mention on the show, why don’t they teach this in school or some variation of that complaint, right? And I think probably, to some varying degree, you are able to say truthfully, “Well, I am. And I’m just doing this on my own. I’m Vanguarding this thing.”

So, tell us a little bit more about where you found yourself teaching in the public school system, what resources you found available and what you actually created and then, also, now in the context of how you filled that in with the curriculum that you’ve helped build here at ChooseFI.

Rob: So, I first delved into teaching financial literacy when I was tasked with it by my principal. A teacher had vacated the position where we had a class that was about personal finance and math that got meshed together.

And the old curriculum that was in place was the Dave Ramsey Foundations of Financial Peace or Financial Independence, whatever it’s called. And I liked parts of it, didn’t like parts of it.

So, I started assembling different bits of curriculum from different places and just realizing that there wasn’t one spot that had it all. And it made me feel like I wanted to write my own curriculum to use in my own classroom. Just something that I knew would work for me. It would work for students and it was going to build students towards this idea of Financial Independence.

At this point, you guys were on the other end of a podcast, didn’t really have any connection to you guys. So, it was a shot in the dark that I reached out.

I said, “Hey, I’m thinking of doing this. You guys sound like you want to do something similar. Is that something I can come on and help with?” And Brad was awesome. He agreed to meet me down in Richmond so I was able to come down. I was on a soccer trip, actually, and I was able to tag on a lunch meeting with Brad. We got to talk all about this Financial Independence idea and what our curriculum could look like in a K through 12 setting.

And then it just so happened that Dani was already thinking on these lines, as well. So, we were able to just team up straight away and get this thing going.

Jonathan: It’s interesting you say that, Rob. You actually… In that sentence you said what would it look like if this were perfect, right? That’s fascinating. But it’s also a pretty big responsibility, a pretty big task to build perfect. If you could have it, if you could have this perfect curriculum, what would it actually look like? What is not out there? What would a perfect curriculum look like?

Building A Financial Independence Curriculum

Rob: So, I think what you would find in existence already was a lot of financial literacy curriculum. So, this was different curriculum that were designed to teach students what different vocabulary words meant. Maybe what the calculations look like. A little bit about compound interest, how to get a mortgage, how to buy a car, what insurance did.

And it’s fine. It does the financial literacy part, but when you start talking about the Financial Independence conversation, well, it’s just a whole new world. And I didn’t think we were preparing kids well enough to go towards Financial Independence the way things were. It needed something more.

So, when we started coming up with ideas of how to do this curriculum, we started with the Pillars of FI that you guys were talking about. And we said, “What would that look like for a high school student?” So, what should a high school student know leaving school that would get them on this path to Financial Independence based on these Pillars of FI?

And then we started working backwards. Okay, what does that look like in middle school? What does it look like in elementary school? And then we divided into smaller groups and started building this thing. And it just took on a life of its own. And it’s become this amazing curriculum that you get to access now and use for free.

Jonathan: So, the way you actually phrase that where you’re working down is interesting because I very much remember saying to Dani in conversation, I was like, “Well, Dani, this is incredible. You guys built this curriculum from the ground up.” And she’s like, “No, you got it backwards.”

So, Mandy, I’m curious, if you were to flesh that out, why is it important that you didn’t build this from the ground up?

Mandy: So, I think what Dani was talking about is that educators really work from this backwards design model. So that we were thinking, like Rob mentioned, the Pillars of FI and then building the curriculum, thinking about standards and really where the kids are headed and then working out into units and then individual lessons that would be appropriate for kids at the different content areas or grade levels that they’re at.

Jonathan: Dani, she mentioned standards in there. Why is it important that these lessons, this curriculum was created with the standards in mind?

Danielle: Great question. What is exciting to us and what we’re passionate about is bringing this curriculum to the students where they already are at. So, what I mean by that is there’s so much thrown at a teacher in a day… Isn’t there, guys? So much thrown at the teacher.

And so, if we can have their day already as it is and throw more at them and we weave the concepts into an existing day, that was one of our goals and that’s what we’re passionate about.

So, here’s what I mean by that. They’re already teaching. Often the teachers of mathematics, language acquisition, they are teaching some of these content areas already. So, what we’ve done is interwoven and weaved these concepts into their existing day.

So, talk third grade, specifically. They’re already in a third grade math classroom discussing a bar graph. So, in our lesson and specific to financial literacy terms, we’re discussing budgeting time. And when we budget time and looking at a discussion, because we’re looking at behaviors, we’re looking far deeper than just the concepts because that’s just habits. And when we go ahead and talk about behaviors, that’s deeper and that’s what sticks with kids.

So, when we’re talking out about a bar graph and we are talking about money, why can’t you interweave the two, as well, in a math classroom? And that’s where Rob comes in. Rob’s doing that right now in his class. And I think it could be beneficial to talk to Rob a little bit about what he’s doing in his day right now.

Working Within A Teacher’s Day

Brad: Dani, quick question. So, obviously we want to make this easy on the teachers, right? Do the teachers need any background in personal finance, Financial Independence, math? Talk me through how a teacher would get this information and not be overwhelmed by it.

Danielle: Fantastic question. The reason why we are so passionate about getting as much as we can in these lessons is because it does have a financial lens to it. But we don’t expect teachers who have a financial background to be the only people that can pick this up. It reaches a broader audience than just teachers who have a FI mindset. Our lessons are geared to impact and be picked up by teachers where they are at.

The reason why we are so passionate about getting as much as we can in these lessons is because it does have a financial lens to it. But we don’t expect teachers who have a financial background to be the only people that can pick this up. It reaches a broader audience than just teachers who have a FI mindset. Our lessons are geared to impact and be picked up by teachers where they are at.

So, what I mean by that is in a lesson we have vocabulary terms and a glossary with our backward design that are sprayed across our curriculum. We map them. We are following concepts such as budgeting throughout pre-K. Yes, I said it, pre-K through 12 curriculum. But we are also going ahead, not just following the vocabulary concepts, but in our lessons themselves, we’re providing rich resources for our teachers.

We have all the materials you need to pick it up where it is at. If you don’t know the concept, we have additional teacher resources for you to look at. So, if you don’t know that concept, you can delve into it and dig into it a little bit more before you teach the kids.

We are really trying to find the community where they’re at and it’s important to us because if we do that, we’re going to reach more of a community. It’s not just geared to Financial Independence and it’s not just geared to minds that are already at that level. We are reaching you at the ground where you’re at.

Lesson Example

Jonathan: So, Rob, Dani teed you up for this next question. But I’m just curious. She has told me about some of the activities that you guys have built into this. Everything from what are you going to take on a space strip to… Which is talking about needs versus wants. I think you highlighted, as well.

But also one that I think is pretty cool in terms of meal planning and knowing price per unit. I’m just curious, if you’re going to highlight one big activity that’s really cool and practical and substantial that’s fit into this curriculum. Give us a highlight reel of maybe one of these.

Rob: Well, let’s talk about the meal planning one because that’s totally inspired by you guys. You keep having this conversation. It keeps popping up about the food budget and how that’s one of the top three expenses in the average person’s budget.

And we have to think about how do you address that at our different age groups? What do you do?

So, at the high school level, we started talking about meal planning. So, start there. What are you going to eat, each of your meals for seven days, or a week-long meal plan?

And then once the students have done that, I said, “Okay, well, let’s go grocery shopping.” So, they have to list out all the ingredients that they need to make those seven meals or sorry, three meals a day times seven days or 21 different meals. And ask them, “What do you think it’s going to cost?” So, estimate the cost of all the ingredients first. And then we actually go research the cost themselves.

And once we see what that budget is, now I ask kids, “All right, well, you clearly have blown your budget because we didn’t know what these things cost. What are you going to take out? What are you going to change? How can you reduce your food plan?”

And they’ll start thinking, “Well, something like lasagna would make three servings instead of just one so maybe I could eat lasagna three times. Or these different foods are really cheap. Maybe I can make those staples for different meals.”

And you start seeing the things that you guys talk about coming from them. And that’s where the most important growth is going to be where they’re having these organic ideas and they buy into it so much more because they’re doing it.

And then if the teacher has the time, the weight around this project is to actually go to a grocery store, let kids go through the aisles, look for the ingredients that they want, and then realize, “Oh, you know what, there’s two or three different options. They’re in different sizes. What do I buy here? How do I get the best deal?” And just from that project alone, you cover so many different topics from personal finance and then even Financial Independence.

Implementing This Curriculum

Brad: Rob, I’m curious, since obviously I’m not an educator and I’m not sure how the curriculum would work in practice. So, is this something that gets interwoven throughout a year? Is it a short term, X number of weeks? Talk me through how you guys envision this curriculum working on the ground level.

Rob: So, this was one where, as Dani alluded to, the different age of the students actually dictate a lot of the curriculum.

So, at pre-K level, which as Dani said, we are actually doing a pre-K part to this curriculum. It’s mostly different storybooks that can be brought into that kind of pre-K classroom that talk about ideas like sharing or delayed gratification, maybe opportunity cost, something like that that’s on their level. You probably wouldn’t ever use those words.

And then when you go elementary, we’re saying, you’re not really going to have a standalone personal finance class at that level. So, let’s find lessons that will interweave with existing math, English, social studies courses.

When you go to middle school, there’s a little bit more flexibility, but I think we’re still dealing with teachers who have 35, 40 minute blocks in some cases. They might be teaching a math, social studies, economics, something like that. And they’re like, “All right, we’re going to find a way to fit Financial Independence, financial literacy into this.”

When you get to high school, that’s when it really gets fun. And I enjoy this so much because there are standalone personal finance classes that do exist. They’re a rare breed, but you certainly can find them out there. And that’s really one of the things that we are trying to do as, I think, a team, the foundation, ChooseFI, we are trying to change the face of financial literacy education in the U.S. and further abroad.

So, in the U.S., we have some states who mandate one semester of personal finance, but then most states are falling somewhere between, we don’t require it at all to maybe we require a couple of hours of it in a semester or a half-semester of personal finance. So, it gets lost in the mix.

But to answer your question, Brad, we have a 18-week semester-long course. So, that’s one full semester. It’s at the high school level for the most part. And then as you go down through the lower levels, you have the units with the individual lessons and topics already built in.

So, teachers can look and say, “All right, I want to do a lesson on budgeting because it fits my existing content already.” And they can go find that and integrate it into their own classes.

How To Spread This Curriculum

Jonathan: Awesome. Yeah. I want to talk about access and implementation here.

So, first of all, let me give a shout out to Rich and Al. I know they are two administrators that have kind of mentored you all through this process as the curriculum has been crafted and been a big help in terms of putting this together.

And we have people listening to this at every level, literally, every level. Superintendent, administrators, teachers, grandparents, parents, charter schools, homeschools. The entire spectrum of who you could imagine using this is listening to this right now.

And I want to work our way top-down and go through what would be your recommendation? So, you have administrators and superintendents, individuals that are in positions of authority and can actually enact change.

What would be first steps first for those types of individuals if they want to start looking into this further? Where would you suggest they start?

Mandy: That’s actually a fantastic question, thinking about where to start.

As Rob mentioned, I think the first thing that I would suggest any school district do is look at your existing maps, look at your existing curriculum. And then take a look at our maps that we made sure that we put together for each of the grade level bands and see where the overlap is.

I think too often in education, sometimes the baby gets thrown out with the bath water and like Rob said, in a dream world, there are all of these standalone classes, but that’s not reality.

So, I think just looking at where there is overlap and how can you maybe take an existing unit in seventh grade math, for instance, on compounding. And how can you tie that into our unit on compounding and you’ll see the same common core standards and you’ll see the overlap. And I think that is a great jumping-off point.

Jonathan: All right, now, let’s just work our way down. So, you have a teacher. Either they want to implement as much as possible, an entire unit, an entire semester or maybe it’s a lesson, something as simple as that. What advice would you give to them?

Mandy: The same thing. I think you can take a similar approach, but I think what is also really nice about the way we thought about the curriculum is we did do that backwards design model, but then we were also very clear with what each individual lesson covers.

So, we’ve set it up in a way where you can see the bigger picture right away, but you can also really drill down and say, “Aha, here’s the one thing that I want to complement this activity that I’ve already got planned or I know I’m trying to target more with debate. And I can see from the name of this lesson and the little description on the map that the kids are actually doing a debate. The topic is just through a financial lens.”

So, again, I think it’s looking at what are your needs and how can our curriculum help you fulfill those needs.

Jonathan: I know a lot of the lessons that you created, we actually have a very large educators group of teachers that have been monitoring the creation of this curriculum that have been weighing in and asking for its release.

But that means that then now this has been created, exists and now they’ve been waiting for it. It’s there and they want to use it in their classroom, but they also want to push it out to the larger school and say, “We really should be doing that. Not just in my classroom but across the county.” Right?

Do we have any, I don’t know, strategies or tactics for opening up those lines of conversation? Have you heard? Are any of the teachers, have they been able to do this successfully? And what, Rob, I guess to some degree you did this. What would be best practice for a teacher to take it to a superintendent, to a principal, to that person, that decision maker, whoever that may be, and start that conversation, recognizing that it’s a big ship and it may take some time to turn?

Rob: I would say because we are starting at the grassroots level, so we are saying we want individual teachers to start taking a look at it and maybe bring it into their classroom, try it out, see what you think. And then if it’s working for you, if you’re like, “This is a good product. I like this and the kids are really getting a lot out of it. It’s better than some of the other stuff we’ve been using.”

Then you say, “Okay, I want to approach my principal, my superintendent, whoever it is and say, ‘look, there’s something really good here. Come into my classroom and look at it.'” That’s where I’ve had the most success. I’ve invited my superintendent, my principals, my administrators to come into my classroom and see, this is what we are learning in this class.

And most of the time, they’re blown away by it. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I didn’t realize we were teaching stuff like this. We need to make this happen more.” And it’s going to be a very slow, it’s going to be a very step-by-step process. I don’t think we’re going to find that we’ll wake up some morning and suddenly this is being taught in every school across the country. But we got to start there and really looking to show that effectiveness of it.

So, looking at financial literacy levels before and afterwards, looking at behavioral changes. So, we have a couple of different ways that we assess students. There isn’t just one financial literacy test that we do. There are measures of behavioral changes.

There are these big projects, like the grocery store one that we talked about that you can say like, “I can get measurable data from this to show that students are making better decisions. They’re changing their behaviors. Their mindset is shifting. And they also know a lot more about how money works.”

And when you’ve got that kind of data, that information, it gives you a really strong footing to go to a principal, an administrator or superintendent and say, “You got to make this change. There’s no other question about it. There’s nothing else you can do except say, ‘This works and we need more of this.'”

Brad: So, right. It’s test it out. Get the data and realize that it’s not all or nothing. Right?

Mandy, as I’m hearing you say in the example of the debate, you might have a lesson on debate generally and you can find something specifically about financial literacy. So, just find a part of your lesson planning where this can fit in as a way to just almost get a foot in the door. Am I hearing you right?

Mandy: Absolutely. I think that is a great strategy. Thinking about what do I have to teach as an English language arts teacher, what do I have to teach as a math teacher? To go back to Rob’s example, I can’t wait to offer this up to health teachers that I know because in districts… In my own district and then nearby districts, we are fortunate enough to have PE every day and there’s a health component to that. And they talk about nutrition all the time and it’s like, isn’t that the next step? How do we eat well? How do we eat healthfully? And then how do we do that on a budget?

So, I think that that’s a really great way to say like, “Okay, my curriculum is pretty set, but could I pull this one activity and then use that to really get the ball rolling?”

Danielle: And now the part that’s also, specifically to administrators, is when you have a curriculum that is already geared as wide as ours is. So, it’s pre-K through 12, that’s a light bulb moment for administrators.

We’ve got a lot of schools that are starting to add pre-K to their elementary system. And so, as a result, we are the first financial literacy program to add pre-K to our curriculum, to my knowledge. So pre-K through 12 is exciting.

So, when you’re going ahead and taking it to administrators, you can say, “We can offer a pre-K program all the way through 12. And here’s why we’re passionate about it. Because pre-K kiddos are having conversations in the classroom already about money. They just don’t know that they’re having them. So, they are discussing bartering. They’re discussing how to work as a team, how to cooperate. And as a result, we are modeling and mentoring them from pre-K all the way up to 12.”

Jonathan: So, what’s interesting and what you’re talking about there is when Rob did the setup for this, he’s like, “What would it look like if this were perfect?” Right?

And so, this is an attempt to create a perfect building block curriculum that goes financial literacy to Financial Independence and it’s woven, instead of being that one extra thing that a teacher has to do. It’s with the teachers and the administrators in mind. It just brings it all together, right? Get more for less. And that’s incredible.

But at the same point, the pricing is pretty cool. Tell us about how much this cost.

Danielle: The other side of it is it’s free. And we mention free because we’re really passionate about getting it in as many people’s hands as possible. For us, it’s more important that more people get to know these concepts. It is life-changing. It’s going to affect our generation. It’s, for lack of a better term, less selfish.

If we’re teaching more people from a young age about money, we’re having better conversations and we’re better as a generation, as a result. And that’s why we’re really passionate about it. Yes, I’m passionate about my teaching. I’m passionate about skills that I’ve learned and that I’ve gone to school for. But I’m passionate about getting kids to talk about money.

So often we were told at the dinner table, “Don’t talk about politics. Don’t talk about money.” I don’t know I was, but let’s talk about money with our kids.

Let’s have conversations. Let’s sit down with my two-and-a-half year old downstairs and have conversations with him about swapping, bartering. We’re already having them. They are the most curious sponge-like minds there are. Why not have them from a young age… So, grandparents, you can pick up these concepts. You can have good conversations with them.

And we have a pre-K program. It’s already there for you to download. It’s in a Google doc format. Teachers, yay. It’s easy to use. It’s free. And our website is also easy to navigate. Hopefully, you’ll also find that.

And we also have a six-email orientation series that we’re going to be sending out. So, when you give us your email, we’ll send that series of emails to you, which will communicate with you through those six-step series of emails about our website. And we’ll talk you through how to use our curriculum from our curriculum map to our lesson plan template. And we’ll actually physically walk you through.

But here is the next part. We’re here to answer questions. So, as you go ahead and email us and ask us questions, we will respond particularly as it’s from the grassroots app. We want to. We’re passionate about getting as many of the lessons in as many hands as possible.

Rob: And just to jump on what Dani is saying, I hope people are getting this loud and clear. This is available for free. It is already built. There are assessments. There are teacher development opportunities. We wanted the cost to be as low as possible because it reduces the barrier to entry. And this is for everybody. This is for the schools that can afford it,  “afford it” if it was a paid for program.

And also for the schools who really don’t have the resources to be bringing in lots of technology, new ideas. There’s no textbooks. There’s no technology. It’s going to cost them a lot of money. The website is free to access. This is the program you can bring into your school with so little effort.

All you have to do is just say to your teachers, “Here it is. Try and take a look at it. See what you can add into your lessons this coming school year, this coming semester, this coming week. And just try it out, slowly integrate it in. It should be a very easy process to integrate it into what you’re doing already.”

Brad: And, Rob, this curriculum is and always will be free, right? This is the centerpiece of the ChooseFI Foundation and it has been made possible by, obviously, a lot of hard work from the three of you and the team and from donations to the foundation. So, that is how this is and will always be free.

Rob: Yep, absolutely correct. There is no, first year is free and then the next year is paid or anything like that. This will continue to be free. It will continue to be added to. This is not just a product that was created and it’s never going to be touched again.

The three of us and any other members that we can bring in are going to work our butts off to make sure this is updated. It is constantly relevant. We’re adding new things to it. It is going to be the best it can be and we want feedback all the time about things that you want, things that could be made better. This should be the, as Jonathan said, the perfect curriculum, the one that meets your needs, where you are and meet your students’ needs, as well.

How To Find The Curriculum

Jonathan: So, I guess with that in mind, that’s pretty awesome. Where can people find this? So, they want to go through the on-ramp. They want to implement it in the classroom. Where’s the one place, the one thing they should do after listening to this episode, Rob?

Rob: Go check out the curriculum. Get on it. Take a look at it. Go through it. It is at www.ChooseFI.com/K12.

Jonathan: All right, Mandy, Rob, Dani, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.

Mandy: Thank you.

Rob: Thank you.

Jonathan: All right. I hope that you’re as excited by this episode as we were to put it together. This is a really big deal. This is the beginning of the next generation. When they interact with personal finance and financial literacy, they are going to be doing it through the lens of reaching Financial Independence.

And regardless of your feelings on “early retirement”, everybody, everybody should be pursuing Financial Independence.

Take us up on this offer. Go check it out. Go to ChooseFI.com/K12. All the lessons are right there. And if you want to learn how to implement them, how to get them in the classroom, there’s a place where you can put in your email. You’re going to get this six-part email series that walks you through an on-ramping process so you can get this thing implemented. Join us as we continue to go down the road less traveled.