Asked to teach a 7-hour course at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, we polled the seniors at this high performing all-girls school to find out what personal finance topics they most wanted to learn, and they came back with:

• How to budget during college and/or grad school
• Understanding how credit cards and loans work
• Buying a car
• And how to invest

We rounded out their 5-class course with an hour on credit scores and, after working with the students, realized they also had a lot of questions about taxes. So, we turned our awesome Casti course into an 8-Hour Workshop to share with you.

Here are a few quick reasons I love this workshop:

• It’s perfect if you don’t have a full semester course on Personal Finance. You can use part or all of the 8 hours in a senior seminar, an advisory, an after-school program, an intersession course, etc. Or, the individual lessons may be JUST what you’re looking to add into your full Fin Lit course.
• It inspired us to create two new activities:
  • A whole-class, up-out-of-your-seats way to teach mutual and index funds (thanks, NGPF Fellow Andrea Stemper for the inspiration)
  • A new spin on our older case study on signing up for a 401(k) — this one’s a little more straightforward and we’re loving it!
• The topics were selected by real high school seniors, who indicated this is what they need to be prepared for the “real world” in just a few months.
• In my humble Jessica opinion, I think a fundamental understanding of credit and investing are the two make-or-break topics that can change a young person’s financial trajectory, so I’m proud we’ve found a way to do them justice in a concise time frame — there’s NO reason EVERY school shouldn’t be equipping their seniors with this info!

I hope you enjoy our 8-Hour Workshop as much as the students at Castilleja did and as much as we did designing it over the past two months!

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Did you miss our most recent webinar “Teach Investing in 2 Hours?” If so, you missed an epic Tim & Jessica tag team event that was better live, I can guarantee, but can also be viewed here on our YouTube channel. Investing in 2 Hours is the final lesson of the 8-Hour Workshop and is a force to be reckoned with!

About the Author

Jessica Endlich

When I started working at Next Gen Personal Finance, it's as though my undergraduate degree in finance, followed by ten years as an educator in an NYC public high school, suddenly all made sense.