Financing the Future: Empowering the Next Generation with Tim Ranzetta

This episode is brought to you by the New Retirement Planner. Create a financial plan for free@newretirement.com. Welcome to New Retirement Podcast. Today we're thrilled to have Tim Ranzetta, the founder of Next Generation Personal Finance, a nonprofit dedicated to revolutionizing financial education for the next generation, on the show with us. So NGPF's goal is to empower every high school student with financial literacy through providing curriculum and training to teachers nationwide and also to support legislative changes that require financial literacy to be taught in high schools. So hopefully I got that right. Tim, welcome to our show. I think I wanted to open with the news. I know that you had some big news in California. We'd love to have you share what happened recently in the last couple of weeks.

Sure, yeah. Thanks, Stephen, for having me on your show. Yeah. The news in California is the end of June became the 26th state in the nation to guarantee all high schoolers a one semester course in personal finance. Aside from it being my home state that I've lived in for 32 years, California is about 13% of the high school population. I believe it's majority Hispanic also. And so I think this is an effort that's been ongoing for two decades. So this year we chose a non traditional path. We knew this was incredibly popular with voters. And when you are blocked in the legislature for 20 years, our thought was let's take this directly to the voters through a process in California called the initiative process. We put together a campaign team about a year ago. We collected signatures, in fact, collection close to 900,000 signatures and we were qualified to go to the ballot. So we were all set to go to the ballot this November. However, in California, there's an option for the legislature to take up the issue. And so when we were able to get a bill that looks in form and substance very similar to what we were trying to accomplish in the initiative, we were very happy that Governor Newsom signed the legislation. A.B. that's Assembly Bill 2927, authored by Kevin McCarty from Sacramento. We were very happy when that got signed in early July.

That's awesome. I know you've been working on NGBF for a while, but you've been working in California for 20 years on this process.

No, no, no. For me it was only three.

Okay.

Still, I didn't get into this business expecting I would need to get into politics. It was three and a half years ago where we looked at where we were as a nation and there were eight states requiring a course in personal finance. And we said, how Can. It's too slow. There were teachers and students making it happen on an individual school basis. But we said, if we want to create systemic change, we're going to have to find a new strategy. And so it was at that time we set up a new entity because nonprofits in the form that we are, we're an operating foundation, can't lobby. And so we created a C4 501 C4, called NGPF Mission 2030 Fund. In the last three and a half years, we've been involved in 18 states that have passed laws requiring a personal finance course. And so it's exciting that it's 26 states, but because of California and it's extremely large state, almost 2/3 of students in high schools across America are either required to take it today or will be in the next several years because there's an implementation period.

No, it's great. I mean, I appreciate the work. I mean, we originally met in a conference you were running like a few years ago, probably five years ago about this. And I had met Jonathan Clements and he's like, hey, I'll be in San Francisco, come on over. And I barely knew Jonathan. And then I met you and you're running the thing. And I met Ellen Roth and some of the Bill Bernstein, like all these guys that subsequently came on the podcast all happened through your NGPF conference. I learned about the work that you're doing was great. And I've been, for what it's worth, you know, trying to at least I mentioned it. Probably it's the most mentioned group in this podcast, you know, because I talk about like, hey, why don't we do this? You know, I mean, it's great that you're at 26 states and 2/3 of students. But yeah, I guess I have two questions, like, why wouldn't the legislature. This seems like such an obvious no brainer. Like why do you have to go through this public driven process to do it? Like, why do you think that was in California?

It's a great question. And I think what we've seen over time is the more engagement we have with the key stakeholders, you know, the folks who are involved in running schools every day. Because you can imagine there's a lot of issues pressing on their time. There's a lot of issues pressing for their attention. One of the things I'm really grateful for is that we were able to have to sit down with key stakeholders during the legislative process. And I think the bill that came out that was ultimately signed answered a lot of the implementation questions that may not have been answered had we gone through the initiative process, because as I mentioned, the bills are not entirely the same. They both accomplish the same thing, but the legislation has more detail. So I think we're geared up and ready to go. And we've had, again, really good conversations with key stakeholders. They compromised. We compromised. And I think that's kind of sign of good legislation.

Yeah, it just feels like there's a. No. Like. Like, why wouldn't. I mean, obviously we're close to this business because we work in personal finance and we're like trying to help people make better choices and we know how important it is for their lives. But it seems like it's a no loss. Like, teach every high school kid about personal finance seems like a good idea, right? Like, there's not a downside to this.

Yeah, I think it's implementation. And I think that's where having an integrated model like we have, which is to say, okay, there's the advocacy piece, which has had success at getting legislation passed. But I think because we can say, and guess what? When you pass the law, we will be ready to partner with you at zero cost to taxpayers. Because our curriculum, which is used by over 100,000 teachers nationwide, including close to 6,000 in California, and, you know, at least 1,000 in almost every other state, not only will we provide you the curriculum and there's other high quality nonprofits with curriculum, but we'll train your teachers. That is the biggest concern they have. Rightfully. So how is this going to get done in the schools? And I think the fact that we can say, don't worry about the curriculum. And by the way, you know, if you buy a textbook for the curriculum, it's out of date the minute you print it. Because as you know, the financial sector moves at warp speed. The third thing we've done, we've added this, you know, we've just responded to the market. We just added another leg. I used to call it a stool. I guess I don't know if stools have four legs or not, but it's implementation. We're going to work directly with state leaders as well as large districts to say, hey, we've got experience working with large entities to be able to scale this new. I think that's really helped us to be able to say that we're not about legislation, we're about successful implementation.

Well, by the way, if you want feedback, our lead educator inside of our company is a woman named Nancy Gates, who is a former Spanish teacher from upstate New York, Syracuse, like the Next town over for I grew up in Rochester. She has looked at your curriculum and would love to give you feedback if you're open to it. She has a lot of ideas about like. I mean she's. Her team educates 2000 people a month about retirement planning and financial planning, mostly adults, like in our business right now. But if you're ever open to it, I'm sure she would love to talk to you.

It's the only way we've gotten better. Yeah. Is teacher feedback is gold. So. Absolutely.

Well, I will connect you. And I'm just glad I got to mention Nancy on this call because she does a lot of good work for a lot of people.

Cool.

Well, look, I'd love to hear from your perspective why you started this business. What drew you to the space?

I'll give you kind of. I think my why goes into two different periods of my life. The first is I was one of the fortunate few to actually get this knowledge at a very young age. My dad was a banker and my mom was a homemaker raising six kids. But she was always somebody who believed in giving back. So she was the Girl Scout troop leader. She rented a library to kids for probably 40 years. She worked at a soup kitchen. So I think the combination of both. I knew a lot of this stuff. I grew up in a family of six. We had to pay for college. That was a great gift my parents gave us because it was a work ethic to like, hey, you got to save money if you want to go to school. I assume most people got this knowledge the same way I did. We used to literally talk about money at the dinner table. Like, I remember as a 7 year old kid, I had a dog walking job. Every Friday I'd get a 5 crisp $5 bill. I'd go walk to the United Jersey bank in New Jersey, deposit it and my dad would want to see the passbook at dinner. And I just remember the feeling I had of like. And he didn't teach me that you could withdraw money until I went to college, which is when I needed all of it. But I just remember the feeling, the warm feeling I had in the habit. I started because my neighbor took about a year to recover. So whatever. I saved $250 over the course of the year. So that's kind of one point in time. And then I volunteered. I volunteered to teach a course at a high school in East Palo Alto, California. It was a school serving first generation kids. And I just saw how excited the kids were to learn this content. Then the UNINTENDED consequence of parents reaching out to me. So there's one student who I still keep in touch with, David. He was the one who was, went home, talked to his dad about investing for retirement. I realized like, kids are going to take this stuff home to their parents. And parents who may not have thought about investing when their high school child comes home and starts talking about it, they want to learn more too. And so I remember going to the brokerage office with David's dad to open an ira and just the sense of pride he had taking that first step to retirement. So fast forward, David's the first student from that high school, Eastside College Prep, to work on Wall Street.

Nice.

You realize, and David was the wide eyed kid who when you're talking about stocks, you could just see like the fire burned within. So I just felt, why aren't we giving every student in this country the opportunity? So I'm going to create an organization to try and make that happen. And that was kind of the genesis. So I taught for eight years, three years into it said, you know, we need to do this on a broader scale. And so I had the very good fortune. We've got a great team at ngpf. Hats off to my co founder Jessica, who's really the driving force behind everything good from ngpf, from our curriculum development to the approach we take to training teachers.

It's awesome to hear the formation story. And it's also great that you were doing the work itself, like teaching the kids and like seeing the impact. And you're like, okay, how do we make this a bigger movement? And yeah, I appreciate that. It takes a team to make it happen. I think it's so interesting that it comes from outside the industry. I think it shows like, one of the reasons I started this company is I was like, I believe there's an incentive alignment problem in parts of financial services where generally, if you look at how people make money in this ecosystem that I'm part of, I mean, like I came up writing software, working at Schwab and different places. And so there's two ways. There's, you know, you're like, if you don't have as much money, people lend you money at varying rates of return. The most onerous is like credit card debt. They hand them out like candy. It's like, I remember going to college and it's like, oh, I was greeted by a bunch of tables, like, sign up for your credit card. I still have a Citibank credit card. It's great. I mean, it's been, I Luckily was like immediately started paying it off. Like I didn't carry balances around, but that's not the business. Right. So that's one way. And the other way is like, if you have a lot of money, you can get great services, but there's very often fees attached. It's not always perfectly transparent. It's really not in the interest of the industry for people to be super well educated because it's like special stuff that financial services does for you. And we'd all do better as a society if people were more educated consistently so they could make wiser choices themselves. But it's interesting, like you had to create this, like you're doing volunteer work teaching and then you got to create this volunteer organization into a 513 or whatever it is. Like, you know, but I guess that's the state of the world.

Yeah, it is. And it's been the most gratifying part of my career. I'm in my late 50s and yeah, this has been. I've never stayed at a job longer than four or five years. I'm on year 10 going into 11 and every day is a joy. So I'm in Kansas City now helping run teacher fin camps. That's our kind of our one day workshop. I was just in Omaha yesterday and I'll tell you, those will carry you a long way. Because there's something different about this community of educators. Because again, something I didn't count on is, you know, the curriculum's important. But ultimately the reason such progress has been made is because 10 years ago folks would have said we can't do this in high schools because who's going to teach it? There's not a lot of financial experts running around high schools. Well, guess what? Today there are. And it's because they want to learn about this. This not only helps them feel empowered because now they're teaching a course where every student's going to walk out saying, I know how I'm going to use this in my life. And also hear from the parents. When they run the parents back to school night, the parents will come in and be like, thank you. This is so important. It's been really difficult for me to talk about at home. But the third piece is it's helped them in their own lives. I mean, the number of teachers who have said, I now understand 403 plan what an index fund is like. And I invest, I know how to invest. To see people so empowered by it. And you can imagine how that impacts their teaching. I mean, it's tremendous because they're great role models. I want to say 75% of our teachers, maybe higher, maybe 80% of our teachers are women. We know there's a gender gap. It's sad, right? There's a gender gap in finance, and now they're helping to close it. And they are the best role models out there.

Yeah, you're touching on a lot of stuff that we're about, which is, like, one of the things is, like, for us, we think that financial confidence is important because it empowers people to do what they want to do, like, find their. Their main thing they can do. Right. So you, I think, have some degree of financial independence and, like, or, you know, have built that in your life, and you have agency. And then you can find things like this very purposeful work that you really lean into. And you don't think of it as work. You're like, it's my calling. Right. And you're really into it. And that's like, I think, a giant unlock. And you therefore do incredible work, like a case study for what we think can happen here. And you're doing that then for other teachers, which is, like, helping them get confident and, like, understand what's possible. Like, that's Nancy's story. I mean, Nancy's, like, financially independent. She worked hard, didn't probably make a fortune as a teacher, but, like, invested it as, like, a boglehead and learned all about it and probably has more money than 90% of the people in our company. Or that she's an unassuming person, walks around, but, you know, that's allowed her to, like, oh, I like what you're doing at new retirement. I'll come teach people here. And then she's like, holy smokes, we're teaching 2,000 people a month. I never thought that was possible. And, like, it's all coming together.

So, anyway, it's awesome that you provide that service.

Well, I actually question for you. A lot of our users do lean into this. Is it only teachers that teach in high schools? Or can people listening to this podcast be like, oh, I want to go sign up with NGPF and go talk to my local high school and see if they do it and support them. Is that something the community can just get behind?

My advice to folks is always tap into your network. So if your kids are in a school district, it's always best to go through somebody who knows somebody in, within the schools. Because, you know, the reality is it can be a challenge. There's a lot of people standing outside the gates of schools Saying, I want to help, I want to volunteer. And. And it can. It can be difficult. Teachers love having guests in the classroom, especially folks with financial expertise. Know that, number one, you're going to want to make sure you somehow know one of the teachers there is going to be willing to let you in. And second, be ready to have an activity ready to go. You can go to our website. We've got a lot of activities that are available. Keep kids. You all know, if you have kids, the attention spans aren't what they used to be. And it took me about 10 minutes of, you know, my volunteer teaching experience as I'm like, I'm going to impart everything I know to these young people, and they're just going to be so. Wow, 10 minutes in, I was flailing.

Yeah.

And I think that's reflected in our curriculum. Like, we have a set of activities called move activities, which, as it sounds, kids are out of the seat doing stuff and learning about personal finance in the process. We have arcade games. Like, I like to think we make finance fun because it has such heaviness to it, because it is so loaded with jargon, because it can be so intimidating. And I think we try and use really a multimedia plus different ways to kind of connect young people to these topics.

Well, it's super empowering. I mean, as you were telling your story about making money as a dog walker and having a passbook, it's like, my. My middle son just got his first. I mean, he's 20, right? Like, my older son worked his whole. Like, he's worked his whole life. And that was. Actually served him really well. He's now like an entrepreneur on his own. Right. Which is crazy. But middle son's, like, teaching surfing. And he was showing me his Venmo or his bank. I was like, got four grand. And he was, like, totally psyched. He's like, I get it. Like, it's good. Like, you know, I mean, he does. Has a great job. He likes it, works with kids and all that stuff. Buddies makes money. It's like, yeah, you know, it's your money. You can do what you want with it. Like, would be good. Like, start investing. And he's like, okay, yeah, no, let's start investing it too. Because I think they picked up a little, like, compounding matters, like, get, get it started early when you're young, you've taught them well. Yeah, it's totally empowering. Yeah. And I'd love to actually dive into. You know, it's so interesting. You're teaching kids and then Some of them teach their parents that motion of. I think, culturally, I think we're definitely coming from a place where people didn't used to talk about money. Like, I grew up in the Northeast. People didn't talk about money. It was rude to talk about money, and people grew up in the dark about it. So it's cool that your family talked about it. Do you see a weird dynamic where you're educating these kids and then they bring it home and they want to talk about it? Do the parents freak out, or do you teach them how to talk to their parents about money?

That's such a great question, because there's so many facets to it. I think what we've seen teachers do is find ways to involve parents in the learning. So maybe it's go home and interview a parent about their first job. I mean, you have to be very careful about how you frame the activity and the questions you're asking. Maybe you skip a generation and you talk to your grandparents. But finding ways. Or sending parents home. We have templated newsletters. So every year that you're teaching, send a newsletter home to the parents. You're not saying they don't know these issues, but you're saying, hey, here's what we're teaching your child. Teachers going even further than that, and this is, I think, a brilliant concept. Renting out the cafeteria and having your personal finance students set up bulletin boards and have the parents walk through. You're there to support your child, but at the same time, there may be a lot of topics there that you're not familiar with. And so you're learning about all the various elements of credit scores and the dangers of credit cards. And you're doing it very nonjudgmental. Just, I'm here to learn and also celebrate my child for this newfound knowledge that they have. Like, I think those are wonderful activities to incorporate parents.

I like the mechanic of interviewing your parents about that. It's great on a lot of, like, you engage them and, like, people like to share stories. And so much of that is, like, how you came up. And, yeah, if your family's really good at it, that talks about it. Like, you inherit that and vice versa.

And you touched on something there, which I think great educators do, too, which is storytelling. Storytelling is so important with families, too. I mean, I always make it a point to talk about my parents who came from basically nothing. My dad had a high school degree coming over from England, spent 42 years at a bank, working himself up from a bank teller to ultimately a Position where he could afford a lifestyle for a middle class family in New Jersey. And there were just things he did that still, you know, I still remember he had a pair of tennis shoes that were like 50 years old, right. They had paint all over them, they had holes in them. That was a symbol to me that, you know, we're investing in you guys, we're investing in kids. And he used to polish his shoes every Friday night. He changed his soles. He never bought new shoes. My mom's closet had such a limited amount of clothing and you just realize that how much self. You don't realize it as a kid, but now that you're a parent and an adult, you think back and you're like, they sacrificed a ton for us.

That's the power of it. Like people learn and then they start living it, hopefully. And the next generation, per your name, they really learn it. It is a generational thing. I mean, I see this in our family too. Like our, we're entrepreneurs. Our son has now become an entrepreneur and it's kind of like, oh, he learned a lot. He was paying a little attention here because he's able to do things that probably most early 20 year olds are not going to do. Like, I'm actually going to go try to start a company out of school from scratch with my own money.

And what's his business?

So he does a business called Rev Dot Delivery. It's like hyper local on campus delivery. And of course I was like, there are venture backed businesses in this space. I was like, and it was a me too business. I was like, oh, there's a lot of reasons I don't think this is a great idea. And of course he does it. He's like, well, as a good option where I was like, well, I see this and you don't, so screw you, I'm gonna go do it. And then he made it work. It's profitable.

Wow.

And now what's happening is interesting. Like venture backed businesses are blowing up because they raised too much money and they had too much cost and it was like, they're making money but they're not making profit and they're kind of imploding a bit. And he has the opportunity to like get assets. So now he's in this next phase of like trying to figure out how to grow it and capitalize it and all that stuff. And so we'll see.

That's awesome. That's an important message for parents too is because even folks who are like, we don't talk about money enough, kids Observe you, they watch what you do. You have to be really cautious. Are the things that you're doing, modeling behavior that you want young people to follow? Because even if you're not talking about it, they're watching bottom line for sure.

Well, you realize, it's like I was thinking about this. I was like, well, we're looking at frankly lending him money as a loan for his business. And I'm like, all right, like I look at as like, I'm entrepreneur, I've got venture backed company here and all that stuff. So I'm looking at and trying to help them make good decisions. But also like, well, you know, you were privileged that you can do this, right. That we could give you enough money to make it happen for you. But like, I don't want to not do it. Like, okay. We've also worked hard our whole lives. I mean we can, we work really hard here. Right? I mean it's part, like every successful person I know, hard work is part of the mix. Right. It's like there's a work ethic that happens and like people see that, but that's what you want. It's like, okay, well we work hard. Like, you know, you want to go for it. There's a real reason you want to go for it. You've proven some stuff already enabling that in other families and across generations. Like, hey, you know, you build wealth and that gives you control. You can do stuff with your own life and you can enable your kids to do stuff with their lives that they might not have been able to do. So I'm getting your name more and more.

So I'm wondering if there's a forgivable aspect to that loan. But we can talk about that later.

I will see. I mean, I think that goes into. There is a whole. I'm not thinking about it that way. I mean, I'm thinking about as like, listen, I want to support you, but I also like don't want to get killed. Like, I'm not like wildly financially independent here. Definitely the mechanic of like there is a lot of money that's going to move between generations and there's a lot of like dialogue around when people should give money. Because like another, I mean, just as an aside, like a lot of people using our platform, they're like, okay, I'm planning till I might be 90 to 100. It showed both the probability you're going to have a certain amount of money, but also the probability that you're going to be alive.

Yeah.

In the future. And it's like, don't over index on 85 to 100 at the expense of like. I mean, yeah, your father made sacrifices, but hopefully he also enjoyed his life. I mean, he did, obviously got rewarded and you got rewarded or your family's gotten enabled. But, you know, there's a balance in life. Per the Jonathan story we were talking about with John and Clements, who backstory here writes the humble dollar and has been a personal finance person that has brought all for the good and across his whole career. And now Fast Forward is 61 years old, has brain cancer, and may only live 12 months. Nothing is guaranteed in life.

Yeah, that's for sure.

In terms of what happens after high school, do you think it's enough just to teach kids in high school, or do you think this needs to continue past high school?

I think first of all, it needs to start sooner than high school. So I think in middle school you can start instilling some of these lessons that have to be developmentally appropriate. Like having a bank account is a good start in middle schoolers. Yeah, I think it needs to continue. My hope is one of the skills you're providing in high school is confidence. I'll call it the two C's, confidence and curiosity. They get the tools to be able to advance their own learning because this is a lifelong learning subject. You know, things are constantly changing in the world of finance. My hope is this leads them down the path. Many people will say, oh, just in time is the way to go. So you really shouldn't talk about mortgages until you're about to sign off on the loan. But I'm just a believer in multiple exposures because you're going to pick up different things as you go. And there's a decay element to this. And that's one of the reasons we've created a curriculum that is really project and activity based, because you remember that activity you did in school a lot more than the lecture that your professor gave. It needs to be ongoing. Products change so quickly. And I have this favorite adage, which is financial products are constantly coming out and they're always going to be ahead of the regulators because they move at warp speed. And it takes time for regulators to move into action and understand what these products are and whether they have the expertise or not. And so if they're not going to regulate, we got to educate. One example from today is buy now, pay later. There's a little bit of regulatory arbitrage going on here. It's not. I think they're going to now call it equivalent to Credit cards or equivalent to a loan. But before that, they kind of fit into this now area. And we as humans tend to be optimistic creatures. And so the idea that you can split something into four payments and not have to pay any interest is pretty darn appealing. Like, of course I'm going to be able to make those payments in the future. Well, probably more aptly should be called buy now, pay late, because 40% of folks who use it pay late fees. So one of the things we have to teach also is just critical thinking skills. And so we have a project be an app reviewer and so them some of the most popular apps out there, whether it's online trading or whether it's buy now, pay later and have them be critics, pros and cons, because the products will constantly be changing. But the idea that you should be looking through a critical thinking lens won't change.

Critical thinking is the cord at all.

And it drives me crazy when people say, how can we spend any time on personal finance when math and reading scores are so low? And I'm like, what do you think personal finance is? It's math. And guess what? Kids learn math when they're motivated to learn it. And if it's about money, they're going to pay a lot more attention than giving them abstract examples that don't apply to them in their life. And then when it comes to reading, hey, guess what? We have these great activities called fine prints. Because I got tired of hearing people say, you got to read the fine print. And then we never taught people how to actually analyze fine print. So we have all these products from a rental agreement to a credit card agreement to bank statement with charges. Like, that's reading, guess what? Like that's really analytical reading too. So we have these real life fine prints and then we have them answer 10 questions to make sure they understand it. So this is how we should be teaching math and this is how we should be teaching reading because the motivation level will be a lot higher.

Yeah, it's something that you will definitely use in your life or you will be abused by if you're not aware of how it works. One thing back to Jonathan that I really like about what he does is he just boils it down like he talks about, okay, you want to invest because you want to capture returns of the market because it's the most efficient use of capital, but you don't want to try to beat the market. There's so much press around like, hey, Nvidia or Bitcoin or whatever. Like there's A fast way to get rich. And everybody loves that idea. So like win the lottery, right? Lottery tickets are, you'll love it. I might have a chance of getting rich, so I'd rather put a lot of money into that than into be guaranteed to get rich. But it's going to take me 20, 20 years. But if you can absorb that lesson and realize that the nominal rate of return is 6% in the market and the real rate of return is 4%. And like, what does that even mean? Right? Well, the real rate is like the inflation, remove inflation, but like that's what you can get safely in perpetuity. Right. If you see things that are going to promise you 100% rate of return, there's nothing that comes in life. If you have high returns, you have high risk, and high risk means high chance of loss. That means if you put 100,000 bucks or whatever, a thousand bucks into something and it has really high expected potential returns, you could also lose it and all of it. And what would that be like?

And I think one of the things that's really been driving legislators to pass these laws to require personal finance education is if we don't teach it in schools, kids are going to learn it through social media, spend a little bit of Time on YouTube and go look at the most popular videos. You know, 10 million views. It's day trading, forex trading. Like we have teachers asking us, can you create curriculum around Forex? We're like, no. Oh, sorry. Like they're selling a 299 program that will guarantee that, you know, we know how to trade current. Are you kidding me? Those are the most sophisticated traders out there. We shouldn't so get rich quick schemes, especially to a young mind, incredibly appealing. Yeah, so we can't get to them before. That's dangerous. And you know, it's funny, you were talking about Nvidia and you know one of the most popular games in high schools today is the stock market game. I've had enough teachers tell me, you know, what happens after the game gets played. You know, the students who spend the most time, who don't perform well because it's an eight week or a ten week game and it's totally random. They walk away believing I'm not an investor. That is the worst possible message. And the person who wins, who's taken, like you said, probably the most risk, probably bet on an earnings announcement or took the highest beta stock or biotech company because they thought phase three trials were coming or they based on momentum, we lionize them. I Always felt a certificate should be made. You are the luckiest investor. We should always like, we should not be leading people to believe. And so we spent a lot of time in our course talking about index funds. When I got started 10 years ago, I'd walk into a room full of teachers and I'd ask how many of you are teaching index funds? And if I was in a room of 100, there might be three. And I was like, okay, I'm going to channel Jack Bogle. We got to bring Jack Bogle the high schools. And so we spend a lot of time and you know, there's a stat that really sticks out. And you've probably seen the research to take different periods of time either 1926 and I've seen studies since 1984% of the stocks contribute almost the entirety of stock market returns. Bessa Binder, or as a professor at Arizona State, if we've ever had an example of like why you shouldn't be looking for the needle in the haystack but instead buy the haystack. That was Jack Bogle, I think, who said that. And then when people say, don't you wish you owned Nvidia? You can say, I do own Nvidia.

I do. Exactly.

And guess what? I benefited from the run up because.

I own the S and P or whatever it is.

Yeah, index fund.

Yeah, index funds. It's pretty interesting. They should change that stock market. Is that stock market game something they teach or just something kids play?

Some will use that as their personal finance course. Is the way we're going to teach the stock market. Now, I do agree to make the stock market come to life, you do have to talk about individual stocks.

Sure.

One of the things I do with my son is like money he saved. We'll sit down and talk about investing. And the only rule I have, you can invest in whatever stock you want, but 50% of it has to be in an index fund just so he can see over time because they are interested. He love Roblox and so he bought roblox at a 52 week high. And he's learned what risk is, right?

That's so interesting. It's so important. What older people have is wisdom, right? And perspective. I remember I interviewed J.L. collins, right? He wrote A Simple Path to Wealth and he lived this journey himself. I've lived it myself too, right. I've made plenty of mistakes along the way. And I remember I had a bunch of cash. He's like, basically the math is just throw it in the market and forget it, it still took me like another few years to actually do that. And he's like, buy like vts X or vt, vti, whatever it is, you know, you can, you can buy these funds on the whole thing. I now have done that. It works. I've done it all. I've traded options, I've traded forex, you know, and I see this in young people, especially men, like, you know, whatever. I, I got a huge time for risk, I'm making some money. Screw it, let's roll the dice. And like you get some wins and you're like, if it's only 10% of your savings or net worth, whatever, I mean it's still expensive for you. But like, like constrain it, don't do it with everything. And these are the people that are lucky enough to like learn about it and like actually be investing. You know, hopefully they don't blow themselves up, but most people just don't even invest. Like a huge punch in this country. Doesn't even invest, doesn't even know how to do it. Or they're in crappy defaults, excuse my language, you know, bad defaults for just getting slowly fixed in the 401k retirement area.

But the trends have been really good recently though in that we're seeing an influx of young investors come in. I think there's a couple factors here. Number one, commission free investing, fractional shares and just really low minimums. And so people are getting more now. You have to balance that out against some of these platforms. Treat investing like entertainment.

It is entertaining, right? I mean, it's entertaining, but you have to have the perspective on what you really should be doing. I mean I've used Robinhood and it's like cool. It makes it really easy to buy individual stocks. But like if you want to look up what you own or your cost basis, you can't find stuff in there. It's like, it's like, what is this? You know, so if you ended up with a material amount of money, it's not obvious, like your portfolios and all that stuff are out of finding your way around. But I'm sure I know they're working hard on it and they did get 20 million people into the market. That's great, but like hopefully help them achieve better outcomes. The whole thing is like achieving better outcomes long term. That's what you're about. That's what we're about. To your point, it's like they should have labels on things. Like they should have a label on the buy now, pay later or Buy now, pay late. Like 40% of this, you're going to end up paying a lot of interest or use this credit card stripe. This is the outcome that you're likely to face. You know, that'd be great to have that known.

They're not looking at credit scores, they're not assessing credit scores. And so typically you're tapping into folks who are not able to get credit elsewhere.

It's called adverse selection. The other thing is people should remember is caveat emptor, which is buyer beware. All these things they know keywords to know. Okay, so you know, as you look forward, what are your goals for next generation personal finance over the next three, five years? How do you think this unfolds?

Our mission, we call Mission 2030. So we set a date certain by which we would hope every high school student has taken a personal finance class. So we've got six years and we've got 36% of students to go. So the good news is, you know, there's clearly a lot of wind at our back because you don't want to be the last state that's guaranteeing this class. I think as an organization, I think the biggest challenge is ultimately it's not about legislation, it's about successful implementation. So we're really excited about the opportunities to work with. You know, there's currently 16 states in the process of implementing to ensure that this gets done well so that there is a highly qualified, confident teacher using a high quality curriculum in every classroom. Because ultimately it's not about 100% of students getting the course, it's about 100% of students getting a high quality course. Our biggest growth area as an organization is really building out our implementation team so districts don't feel like they're going alone here because the high school curriculum unfortunately does not change that often. And so when you have a change like this adding in a semester course, there's not folks with a lot of experience to pull something like this off. So we're really excited about partnering with states and large districts to ensure success. So, you know, again, the market's going to basically triple over the next three to four years. I love growth because it creates an entirely new set of challenges. Some you anticipate and some you, you figure out as you go. You know, we've had a pretty good track record of adjusting the organization to meet the needs of the marketplace.

How many people are in the organization today?

17.

17. And how many teachers have you trained?

17,000. In the last four years?

One to 1,000.

So that's 17,000 unique teachers. And they've invested on average 25 hours with us. So, you know, we do courses, 10 hour courses on specific topics to one day workshops called fincamps again, which we're doing 15 of them this summer. And we also do conferences. We'll have a back to school conference virtual conference on August 24th. So I think it's the greatest. It should be anybody who wants to get into this space, whether it's an incumbent who's currently doing work or whether it's a philanthropist who's saying, how can I help this movement, it's very simple. Invest in teacher professional development.

Okay, awesome.

You know, that's another thing. You've got a lot of listeners who are very financially sophisticated. Mentor a teacher, find a teacher in the district who's teaching this. The number one topic they are least comfortable teaching is investing. We have an investing course, an advanced investing course. We run a lot of professional development around it because for me that is the, the single most important topic in terms of building long term wealth.

Interesting. We should give access to our planning platform to these if they want it. You know, we can have like a student version for kids to create financial plans. It's kind of interesting. You look across your whole life. It's like, okay, we show people like what happens in the future. How many kids have you taught?

The typical teacher. In a given year, there'll be about 50,000 teachers actively using our curriculum. On average, they reach about 80 to 100 kids. So upwards of 5, 5 million kids a year.

Wow, that's amazing. Look at you. From an idea to 17 people to. You said 17,000 teachers, you've trained up and then you're. They're teaching 5 million kids a year.

So the numbers are basically over 100,000 on our platform. 50,000 active per year. Okay, 50,000 use our curriculum. 17,000 have participated in professional development.

Got it. It's impressive.

It's fun.

Bend that curve. Hopefully the kids appreciate it. We should interview. You said David was the first student.

Yeah, actually we had him. We had three of my students. So we celebrated our 10 year anniversary in May and we brought back three of my students. Yeah, I get chills down my spine just thinking because you ask the question, what do you remember from the course? So there's one student who's like, I remember Career day. You brought in all these, you know, that was one of my favorite. It was the last session. I'd bring in six professionals and they'd sit at a table with four kids and the Students would learn how to do informational interviewing. And he said, I met an entrepreneur. You'll love this. He said, I met an entrepreneur. I didn't realize they existed. I didn't know what they were. Turns out he's an entrepreneur. And then there was David, who's like, I remember the first class you taught. You taught us think about investing. And then I told the story about David earlier. And there's another student who's at Stanford now who reached out to me, I think her freshman year at Stanford. She said, I remember you talking about index funds. I got a job this summer. I want to do a Roth ira. Can you just remind me what I should be thinking about? Wow.

Yeah, it is amazing. I think it's about more of, like, what's possible. I think that's what's so powerful. Like, I remember in college, I graduated, I had no idea what I was going to do. And then I talked to a friend of mine. I went to Princeton, I went to Boston University. He's like, yeah, I'm interviewing a McKinsey and Bain. I'm like, what are these things? You know, like, I had even no idea they existed. And then because I read up about them and I was able to talk about them with other people, it like, helped me get hired at a better job, which, like, enabled big things. But it's like, if you don't have the awareness of what's out there or how this works, that's where you get hosed and like. Or you don't appreciate the why you go to college or. Yeah, learn about personal finance and just how the system works. You're going to be subject to the system. You can spend your whole life basically subject to that, which is a bummer versus, like, using the system to your advantage.

Absolutely.

That's the power of it. Okay, awesome. Well, great. So we will link to next generation personal finance, help people get connected. We'll make that easy for people. We would love to have our community with our people, like, meeting up now about our little platform, which is kind of crazy. Like their little meetups. And so we're like, okay, let's have these people do some good stuff too. So hopefully we will make it easy for folks to get connected and mentor teachers, teach them about investing, like, get into high schools. You know, I think that's super powerful stuff.

We've got stuff on our website too. So, you know, we've seen changes happen at the grassroots. And so we've seen parents testify at school board meetings at their local school district saying, this is important. We should be teaching this. And here there's no cost, there's free curriculum, free professional development. We've got some advocacy resources on our website too, to help people like, make the case.

Last question for you. Do companies, I'm sure lots of companies would want to be part of this, but are there companies that you see that could be aligned to where they make it easy for kids to save or whatever it is, you know, in an aligned way that participate in this or is it like totally no commercial stuff, which I could also see would make a lot of sense.

Yeah, I mean, I think there is. When it comes to curriculum, mixing commercial interests with curriculum is kind of a big no, no. I would say we're seeing more and more corporations get in the game and actually creating high quality financial literacy resources where in the past it might have been window dressing. We'll just throw a lot of content up there. I think there are some groups out there being a lot more thoughtful about creating curriculum. And then obviously there's a huge, you know, one of the largest platforms out there, Khan Academy, recently entered the game and they're building kind of a robust personal finance curriculum. So there's going to be no shortage of resources out there. And again, I think where the most opportunity for investment is really in how do we support teachers and make sure that, you know, they're ready when these. Because there's going to be a huge influx of new teachers required to teach it. The good news is they are extremely motivated to want to learn this. They both want to teach the course and they want to help themselves.

Well, we're going to have to try to figure out how to support those folks too, ourselves. So I'll think about that. Okay. Anything else you want to share with our audience before we wrap it up?

No, just the thanks for the opportunity to speak to your audience.

Tim, I appreciate you coming on and sharing the work you're doing with Next Generation Personal Finance. We'll link to it. Congrats. What you've built, I mean, it's really impressive to hear the story about how you started teaching and now built a team and educating tens of thousands of teachers and millions of students every year. It's good stuff. It's all for the good. And then for folks out there, go to Next Generation Personal Finance. Look up Tim Ranzetta. Look up Jessica. Sounds like she's the co founder. And find ways to pitch in for, you know, our audience in general. All feedback this podcast are welcome. All reviews are welcome. Any sharing is welcome. If you want to build your own personal financial plan. You can do it for free@newretirement.com thanks, Tim.

All right. Thanks, Steven.