Education Archives - Poorer Than You

What do Will Smith, Samuel L. Jackson, the Jonas Brothers, Christian Slater, Cedric the Entertainer, Seth Green, Oscar the Grouch, Rosario Dawson and the E*Trade Babies know about personal finance? Hopefully a lot, because tonight they’re all participating in a one-hour ABC Special called UN-BROKE: What You Need to Know About Money.

I found out about UN-BROKE last week when an awesome teenager (and fellow Buffy fan) I know posted this clip staring Seth Green on her Facebook account:

(RSS and email readers may have to visit the site to see the video)

I was thoroughly impressed with this clip — not only is Seth Green still one of my favorite actors, the financial advice in the clip is fairly sound. Sure, some of the advice is a little generalized, for example: keeping your housing costs under 1/3 of your gross monthly is a good rule-of-thumb, but it should really be less than that if you have significant debt. Still, if you’re looking for a little financial education that’s pretty much guaranteed not to be boring, this is definitely worth checking out.

If you want to see more clips from UN-BROKE, there’s some related videos in the embedded video player above you can watch. Or you can visit ABC’s UN-BROKE website and watch them there.

UN-BROKE hits the airwaves tonight, May 29th at 9pm EDT. Check your locals listings for more details. And if you’re on Twitter, you can catch me (and many others) live-Tweeting the special using the hashtag #unbroketv. You can join in as well, just by adding that hashtag to any tweets about the show!

Hopefully the special will be up on ABC’s streaming video service after it airs, for any of you who miss it tonight!

Over at Get Rich Slowly, J.D. is celebrating Financial Literacy Month. He wants to know if anyone has any financial literacy resources to share, and actually, I do!

The Mint is a financial resource for kids, teens, parents and teachers. The “Kids” section (which is aimed at both kids and teens) offers tons of information, on earning, spending, savings, investing, giving, owing, safeguarding, and tracking money. There’s also a “Try It” section, full of quizzes and quick games to test knowledge. Adults might want to try the quizzes themselves, to see how their own knowledge stacks up!

In the “Parents” section, there’s another set of quizzes, called “Your Financial IQ.” The site recommends taking these quizzes because “research repeatedly reports this fact: children say they learn all they know about money from their parents.” The “parenting guide” offers advice on how to talk to kids about money, how to handle allowances, and what do when kids finally leave the nest.

The “Teachers” section offers lesson plans for budgeting, credit, scarcity, and the stock market. Parents might also give this section a glance, especially if you’re worried these topics might not be covered in school.

One last note about the site: it’s a good resource, well laid out, easy to navigate – but the graphics (photos of people with large heads) creep me out a little. I’m just saying.

The other site I’ve found is the Securities and Exchanges Commission’s Tips for Students and Teachers. Although not as graphical and interactive as The Mint, this one page site covers topics such as “Why Save and Invest?”, compound interest, types of accounts, risk, diversification, credit management, and planning financial security.

At the end of the page, there are several quizzes and calculators to play around with.

If you’re looking for more resources, check out J.D.’s Financial Literacy for All Ages.