Helping Adults Gain Complementary Skills

From Paycheck to Paycheck to Financial Freedom

Financial freedom does not come overnight, unless you happen to win the lottery.  Financial freedom comes from learning the basic elements of money management.  The basic premise behind money management is that an individual can control his/her money. Money does not have to control the person.  An excellent resource for students is the College Survival textbook, Becoming a Master Student, 1991; Ellis.  This book is used in many community colleges throughout Florida.  It includes a lot of information about money management and how students can become better money managers.

By the time students begin talking about money, they are usually already facing a number of problems. Ideally, questions about money would arise before the problems do - but that is not often the case.  The bottom line, according to the College Survival textbook, is that there are three ways to solve money problems.

• Increase money coming in
• Decrease money going out
• A combination of the two

As the VPI instructor, it is important that you talk to students about money management before it becomes a major problem for them.  How do you do this and still relate what you are teaching to the academic skills of reading, writing and mathematics?  First, you begin by using math as a way to teach money management.  You can incorporate budgeting, checking, saving and financing into the basic skills of mathematics.  Provide students with real-life money problems that they can solve using basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  Increase the level of difficulty by incorporating percent and probability problems.  Use a real-life context to teach these skills.  Remember, students retain information better if they can relate it to something in their own lives.  Let's face it, everyone has to deal with money.