Teaching Financial Literacy, Or Why I Love My New Job

by mzumtaylor on February 8, 2011

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my new schedule and the fact that my posting was going to be slightly irregular over the next little while.

Clearly, my posting schedule here hasn’t normalized yet, but it’s been almost a month since I started my new job, and I think I’m figuring out a way to make two jobs, a blog, and a personal life work. 😀

Teaching Financial Literacy

So what is my new job, you might ask. I’m working for a not-for-profit division of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, working to improve financial literacy education in the state’s schools (and all over the country). I’m learning about all sorts of wonderful resources for teaching financial literacy, including Money Smart Colorado and the Jump$tart Coalition, which is based in Washington D.C., but has state coalition partners in 48 states (Colorado’s page).

One of the things my office does is maintain a website called Education Cents, which is a very valuable resources for any one looking to improve their financial knowledge, although it’s primarily targeted at high school and college students (and their parents).

Education Cents has been my favorite thing about my new job. Not only does it have a blog, for which I occasionally write, but it also has financial literary courses (if you sign up for free the site will track your progress in the courses), online games, and a bunch of useful tools, including calculators and specific budgeting tools for people of all age.

Just for the record, Education Cents isn’t paying me to promote the site on my blog. I would be recommending this website even if I didn’t work for the company that created it; it’s a genuinely useful tool for helping people learn about money and finance.

Why I Love My Job

About a month and a half before I found out that this job existed, I was telling my mom that I would be supremely happy if I could figure out some way to get someone to pay me to help teach people about personal finance.

… Ask and ye shall receive, I guess, because that’s exactly what I got in this job.

Every day I get to help facilitate the training of people who will teach others about personal finance, not to mention helping spread the word about our website and introducing people to the joys of budgeting. I think it’s safe to say I found my dream job.

What Does This Mean for You?

Every so often I will link to content at the Education Cents website, just the way I occasionally link to content at the sites of my favorite bloggers.

I will also share with you the blog posts that I post on that site, when I think that they will be relevant to the audience of this blog.

If any of you have checked out the Education Cents website, what do you think? Am I right in thinking it’s relevant to the interests of the readers of this blog?

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

image Jacqueline Kinnemeyer February 21, 2011 at 10:22 pm

Hello – Stumbled across your blog and would love to talk to you. I am a recent college grad who has been working for a Technology Consulting firm in Financial Services for a couple of yours and would love to transition into doing something similiar to your new job. Look forward to hopefully talking to you soon.

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