Personal finance lessons – for teachers, not just students – offer real value at VCU conference

By Leila Ugincius

One of the biggest messages Jeremiah Riesenbeck tries to impress upon his high school students is the importance of managing credit.

"You don't want to be 10 years into your career with an advanced degree and still be working an almost full-time weekend job" to pay off creditors, he said.

Riesenbeck is speaking from experience: He navigated two bankruptcies in recent years. He now teaches economics and personal finance in the Roanoke City public school system, and while he never took such a course - a requirement in Virginia since 2011 for most high-schoolers- he could have benefited from one.

"My parents were not very forthcoming with talking about finances," Riesenbeck said. "[And] most of what I learned was wrong anyway."

This month, the VCU Financial Success Center by Virginia Credit Union - a unit of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Business - partnered with the Virginia Council on Economic Education to present Financial Foundations. The personal finance conference for educators such as Riesenbeck covered topics included budgeting, investing and saving for future needs, and the teachers joined industry experts to exchange ideas and develop strategies to empower themselves and their students.

The Virginia diploma requirement makes it "imperative to provide our teachers with personal finance resources and education that they are able to take back to their classrooms," said Amy Pridemore, executive director of the Financial Success Center.

Riesenbeck, who grew up in Las Vegas, draws on his own story to teach his students about economics. He filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy several years ago amid mounting medical and credit card debt. After relocating to Virginia, he faced additional medical debt and unexpected moving costs. He then filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which involves a plan to repay creditors.

"I teach my kids to do as I say, not as I've done," Riesenbeck said. "I try to be very upfront and be like, 'Look, you're not perfect. You're going to make mistakes, but hopefully we can mitigate some of them so you don't end up in the same boat I am.'"

Stephen Day, director of the VCU Center for Economic Education and a presenter at the Financial Foundations conference, said it's never too early to develop good financial habits. So supporting teachers offers a compelling reward: students who can benefit for a lifetime.

"They'll carry these habits into adulthood, which will affect whether money is something that they can control or whether money controls them," said Day, who writes the Paper Robots blog that offers accessible advice to adults and youths based on research and real-world experience and is the recent recipient of the national Economics Pedagogy Scholar Award from the National Association of Economic Educators. "If they learn about economics, they can understand how money flows and what the larger effects of their choices are. Basically, elementary grades are when kids develop agency when it comes to money."

In Northern Virginia's Loudoun County, conference participant Janice Decker is both imparting and learning lessons she shares with her students at Freedom High School.

"There are other classes that they're going to use in life, but personal finance is a class that you're going to use daily," she said. "The one thing I tell them is do not do what Mrs. Decker did - as soon as you get your first real job, invest."

Decker said she has always been a saver, but she hadn't thought much about investing those savings until she started teaching this class.

"That's advice that my college professor gave me. I don't know why … but I didn't take that advice. If I had, I would have had enough money to retire by now," Decker said. "I realized I had missed out on at least $60,000 by keeping my money in a regular savings account, versus having it in a compound interest savings account."

Decker wasn't the only educator at the Financial Foundations conference to stress how it's never too late to develop good habits. Karen Short teaches personal finance at the Virginia Correctional Center for Women in Goochland County, and while the course is not a requirement for the residents, "it's important for so many reasons," she said.

"There are students that don't even know how to balance a checkbook [or] even write a check out. They don't know anything about a debit card or credit card and everything that goes with it. They don't know anything about taxes and the tax forms that you need to fill out," Short said. "Overall they need the information. When they get out, if they want to pursue [an] education, they need to have certain skills."

And skill development is important for teachers, too.

"This conference offered us an opportunity to bridge academia and outreach while building community between K-12 educators and VCU," Pridemore said. "It was a fantastic opportunity to … [bring] in our VCU faculty and staff to provide educational sessions. We hope that the teachers left feeling motivated, empowered and ready to return to their classrooms with an abundance of tools to teach personal finance in the fall."

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