I am so proud of the NGPF team (Jessica, Sonia, Laura, Ren, Sid and Niko) that has worked feverishly to deliver a revamped Saving Unit that we released tonight. Why do we continue to revamp our lessons? The short answer can be found in our culture of continuous improvement as we are always looking for ways to make our lessons stronger (your feedback is critical in this process). Here is the longer answer: 

1. The financial services landscape is undergoing dramatic changes and we need to update the curriculum to reflect this. A perfect example of how we address these tectonic shifts can be found in this new Activity: Investigate Apps That Force Us To Save. Many of the apps that students research in this activity didn’t exist two years ago when we first created this unit. Here’s a recent blog post looking at how much has changed in financial services over the last fifteen years. We owe it to students and teachers alike to stay apace of these changes.
2. We pride ourselves on keeping our resources (videos/articles/interactives) current and relevant. Since we first created the Saving Unit a few years back, we have written over 1,000 blog posts and uncovered new resources that we think are better at teaching Saving concepts.
   1. For example, we added resources in this revamped unit on specific TYPES of savings goals and the accounts that can help teens achieve them, including teen IRAs, Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and opening separate savings accounts for each of their goals.
3. We created ten new comprehension questions for each of our four Saving lessons and updated the 25 question pre-test to reflect the changes to the unit’s learning objectives. This is a milestone in that we now have ten questions for ALL of our lessons in all of our units.
4.  We have aligned the revamped Savings Unit to the Jump$tart National Standards whereas the earlier version was not.

Please let us know what you think about this new unit. Thanks to all of you who provided feedback that we incorporated into this revamp. We will continue to rely on your wise counsel to guide our future updates. Happy Saving!

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.

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