Turning 25 has its pros and cons financially -- I can avoid the “young driver” fee when renting a car but I will have to get off my parent's health insurance. As I go through my quarter-life crisis, I wanted to share with the NGPF community three finance lessons I have learned while working at NGPF for the last eight years.

Lesson 1: The World of Personal Finance Changes Rapidly

NGPF’s Curriculum is rooted in the “4Cs” -- one of them being “Current” (others being Comprehensive, Curated, and Customizable). In the past couple of years, I have come to believe that this is the most critical C of the 4. A year after graduating from high school, I wrote a blog post about the state of my financial life. Throughout the years I have been increasingly embarrassed about this post and have thought about secretly deleting it (I am hoping that in a couple of years I will be embarrassed about this post too). For example, I talked about having an online-only bank account that made it difficult to deposit cash into. However, nowadays even online bank accounts list deposit-sharing ATMs where you can deposit cash. I am extremely grateful for the amount of time the curriculum team spends updating the NGPF Curriculum to keep it current. 

Lesson 2: The Value and Cost of College is Too Complicated

My favorite topic in personal finance is Paying for College because for the past three years, I have been in absolute crisis trying to figure out what the value of a college education is. Is it the friends I made along the way? Is it the degree I can put up on my resume?

When choosing colleges, I chose a school that ranked well in ROI at the time. However, I did not do enough research -- I realized after attending that a quarter of the students were engineering majors which inflated the return, especially for a liberal arts school. College Scorecard has more information today on median income by major after graduation than when I was applying for school but one has to realize this data is only based on students who received federal student aid. In sum, I think it is crucial to think about how you are paying X for the degree with the expectation of earning Y but it’s actually quite difficult to determine what X and Y really are.

I have found some hope reading Ron Lieber’s The Price You Pay for College and following Mark Salisbury from TuitionFit who is trying to increase college pricing transparency. However, there is so much work to do to make it easier for the public to determine the value and cost of college. I hope you can join Mark for this upcoming Virtual PD session on college affordability.

Lesson 3: No One is Getting it All Right

I feel a lot of pressure to get my personal finance affairs right -- especially since my peers often turn to me for all things money-related. However, I have made a plethora of mistakes. I have had to pay an overdraft fee, a bounced payment fee on a credit card, and more. It’s important to recognize when we make a mistake so we can try not to make the same mistake again. This is why for every financial “win” I have shared with my friends, I am conscious about also sharing a “loss”. As I turn 25, my friends now have jobs and talk 401(k)s with me (which was not so much the case in college) and I am hoping that guaranteeing access to personal finance education will allow more open conversations about money -- so we can all learn from our financial triumphs but also each other’s mistakes.

About the Author

Ren Makino

Ren started interning at NGPF in 2014, and worked part-time through high school and college. With his knowledge growing alongside NGPF, he joined the team to work full-time after graduating from college in 2020. He is also the producer of the NGPF podcast. During his free time, he likes to try out coffees from different roasters across the world.

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