Hey, how are you? All right. Hey, I'm on the line today with Tony Asola. He's my colleague here at Ritt-Othwelfth Management and I wanted to have Tony on today so we could just discuss his recent post what happened when we spent a week teaching high school

kids about money, where he writes about his experience teaching a personal finance mini course

to a slew of 10th through 12th graders. So for the purposes of this discussion,

it's important to note that prior to becoming

an investment advisor, Tony was a public middle school

teacher and has a passion around financial literacy and providing teachers with better retirement options.

So first off, Tony, what did Dina and Matt and you try to teach these kids about money and

personal finance during the week?

Well, first of all, we tried to show them, like, the biggest problem I think in financial

literacy is you might learn about it, but then you don't apply it maybe for many years later, right?

So like, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to teach a kid right now about Social Security.

Because it's just, it's ridiculous.

They can't even conceptualize themselves being like beyond 21 or something.

So we try to teach them things that would come up immediately. For instance, we would teach them, you know, about college loans, about credit cards, about creating a budget,

and finally about compounding and starting an investing program, which they could start right now so the main focus

was hopefully to get them to actually act upon what we did because that's a big

reason why many of these programs don't work because there's just too big of a gap between the knowledge and the application.

Yeah, no, honestly, the only thing I can remember from high school talking about personal finance was playing one of those silly stock market game.

So I know you, I know that's one of your bugaboos as well.

But one of the things from your posts that kind of jumped out of me was how you know we're

asking 17 and 18 year olds to make a huge financial decision when it comes to college and

you know potentially taking out loans to pay for that and if you

...