Good Tuesday Morning!

1. Question – Where do we get our financial education?

2. Thought – “Mom,” he continued, “I don’t want to work as hard as you and dad do. You make a lot of money, and we live in a huge house with lots of toys. If I follow your advice, I’ll wind up like you, working harder and harder only to pay more taxes and wind up in debt. There is no job security anymore; I know all about downsizing and rightsizing. I also know that college graduates today earn less than you did when you graduated. Look at doctors. They don’t make nearly as much money as they used to. I know I can’t rely on Social Security or company pensions for retirement. I need answers.”

He was right. He needed answers, and so did I. My parents’ advice may have worked for people born before 1945, but it may be disastrous for those of us born into a rapidly changing world. No longer can I simply say to my children, “Go to school, get good grades, and look for a safe, secure job.”

I knew I had to look for new ways to guide my children’s education.

As a mother as well as an accountant, I have been concerned by the lack of financial education our children receive in school. Many of today’s youth have credit cards before they leave high school, yet they have never had a course in money or how to invest it, let alone understand how compound interest works on credit cards. Simply put, without financial literacy and the knowledge of how money works, they are not prepared to face the world that awaits them, a world in which spending is emphasized over savings. (Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki)

“A four-year degree today can be expensive enough to create six-figure debt. We can’t forgive these loans, but we should take steps to help students.The big problem is the federal government. There is no reason the federal government should profit from student loans. This only makes an already difficult problem worse. The Federal Student Loan Program turned a $41.3 billion profit in 2013.

These student loans are probably one of the only things that the government shouldn’t make money from, and yet it does. And do you think this has anything to do with why schools continue to raise their tuition every year? Those loans should be viewed as an investment in America’s future.”

“Competition is why I’m very much in favor of school choice. Let schools compete for kids. I guarantee that if you forced schools to get better or close because parents didn’t want to enroll their kids there, they would get better. Those schools that weren’t good enough to attract students would close, and that’s a good thing.

For two decades I’ve been urging politicians to open the schoolhouse doors and let parents decide which schools are best for their children. Professional educators look to claim that doing so would be the end of good public schools. Better charter or magnet schools would drain the top kids out of that system, or hurt the morale of those left behind. Suddenly, the excellence that comes from competition is being criticized. ” (Donald Trump)

Good Monday Morning!

1. Question – If you don’t have a good job, how do you plan on getting rich?

2. Thought – One day in 1996, one of my children came home disillusioned with school. He was tired and bored with studying. “Why should I put time into studying school subjects I will never use in real life?” he protested.

Without thinking, I responded, “Because if you don’t get good grades, you won’t get into college.”

“Regardless of whether I go to college,” he replied, “I’m going to be rich.”

“If you don’t graduate from college, you won’t get a good job,” I responded with a tinge of panic and motherly concern. “And if you don’t have a good job, how do you plan to get rich?”

My son smirked and slowly shook his head with mild boredom. We have had this talk many times before. He lowered his head and rolled his eyes. My words of motherly wisdom were falling on deaf ears once again.

Through smart and strong-willed, he has always been a polite and respectful young man.

“Mom,” he began. It was my turn to be lectured. “Get with the times! Look around; the richest people don’t get rich because of their educations. Look at Michael Jordan and Madonna. Even Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard, founded Microsoft; he is now the richest man in America, and he’s still in his 30s. There is a baseball pitcher who makes more than $4 million a year even though he has been labeled ‘mentally challenged.'”

There was a long silence between us. It was dawning on me that I was giving my son the same advice my parents had given me. The world around us has changed, but the advice hasn’t.

Getting a good education and making good grades no longer ensures success, and nobody seem to have noticed, except our children. (Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki)

“.Vouchers: “I’ll tell you why I won’t support vouchers. Number one, I don’t think they’re constitutional. But number two, I don’t see how you would implement them without having a lot of people get vouchers for schools that would be teaching things antithetical to American values.” Charter schools: “I actually do believe in charter schools.”

 Non-cognitive skills: “I believe it is time we get back to teaching discipline, self-control, patience, punctuality. The biggest complaint that I hear from employers is that young people who show up for jobs don’t have those habits. They don’t get there on time. They don’t know how to conduct themselves appropriately.”

Teacher pay: “Not only don’t we pay teachers what they deserve to be paid, in other countries that have better test scores than ours–you hear about that all the time–actually teachers get paid much more on an even standard with professionals who are engineers and in other walks of life. We have to face the fact that we have a lot of people who come out of school burdened with student loans and decide they can’t go into teaching, so we lose a lot of good young people.”

 Public education: “The public school system has been, I believe, second to the Constitution, the most important institution in making America the great country that we have been over the last 200 plus years.”

Issue soup: “Let’s put money into what we know does work, like smaller class sizes, higher teacher pay, and better curriculum. Let’s use interventions that work. That means extended learning time, it means summer school, it means stronger parental involvement from the very beginning of a child’s schooling.”” (Hillary R. Clinton)