Advocacy

• The West Virginia Senate considers two education bills: a financial education bill requiring a high school class, right alongside one reestablishing cursive writing in elementary school. (Bluefield Daily Telegraph)

Personal Finance

• Ever wonder what files you should keep and for how long? Michelle Singletary of the Washington Post explains how she used “Homefile: Financial Planning Organizer,” by certified financial planners J. Michael Martin and his wife Mary E. Martin to help her get her financial files in order.

Banking and FinTech

• Quartz looks at FinTech’s attempts to move into banking, as online bank Varo receives FDIC regulatory approval. Who will be next?

Career

• Forbes covers the release of a report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation entitled “Hiring in the Modern Talent Workplace,” and concludes it is more about the skills than the degrees.
• U.S. Labor Force participation lags behind other developed countries. Fed Chair Jerome Powell was questioned about this as he appeared before congress last week, and explained the roadblocks to higher participation (education and addiction). (Washington Post)

Student Loans

• Forbes breaks down the proposed changes to the Federal Student Loan program in the new federal budget.

Investing

• Here is a fun one filled with 92 Years of Market Return Data from A Wealth of Common Sense. Good material applicable to lessons in math, economics, and finance classes!
• Here is another fun one about the only publicly traded consumer space company, Virgin Galactic. What is “fueling” its “soaring” stock price? (Reuters)
• And Morgan Stanley announces they will buy E*Trade for $13 billion, further consolidating the investment industry as regulatory restrictions ease. (Yahoo Finance/Reuters) This is good news for Vanguard too. Why? Because they own a lot of E*Trade! (Yahoo Finance)

Credit Management

• As if payday and title loans weren’t scary enough, the Consumer Federation of America found that these lenders are getting their delinquent customers arrested.

Budgeting

• 5.5 million people dropped cable/satellite services last year, up from 3.2 million in 2018. (WSJ-subscription) YouTube is filling in the gap, leading in mobile streaming by a long shot. (The Verge)

Home Ownership

• Technology is about to disrupt the $34 trillion US residential real estate. (The Economist )
• A quarter of homeowners could have used a personal finance class! According to a Bankrate survey, 27% of homeowners don’t know what their mortgage interest rate is! You can imaging what else they don’t understand about mortgages. (MSN)

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