Financial Literacy and Personal Finance For Kids

Paving Our Path

Laying The Foundation For Kids' Future Financial Well-Being

Explore Our Blog Posts

As adults, we will need to earn money and manage our money. We also, if possible, will want to try to grow our money and protect it. In the blog posts we publish, we will explore core concepts of personal finance such as earning income, budgeting & spending, saving & investing, borrowing, and protecting your money & managing your risk.

Paving Our Path

Improving the Financial Future of Children Through Practical Education

Paving Our Path is an educational non-profit organization whose mission is to help kids in middle school and high school understand core concepts of personal finance so that they eventually can achieve financial independence and financial stability in their lives when they become adults.

Knowledge is power, and our objective -- through a series of educational blog posts and other forms of communication -- is to empower kids so that they can make more informed and better decisions about their financial future and develop, sooner rather than later, greater confidence in their ability to eventually achieve their personal financial goals.

The Problem of Financial Illiteracy:

In the United States we spend billions of dollars helping children master reading, writing, and math. And yet, we send kids and young people out into the real world of work lacking basic knowledge of personal finance. Consider the following:

More than 1 in 6 students in the U.S. do not reach the baseline level of proficiency in financial literacy. (1)

Less than 10% of students in low-income schools have guaranteed access to financial education. (2)

Only 1 in 5 high school students is guaranteed to take a personal finance course before graduation. (3)

Only 10 U.S. states guarantee at least one semester course in personal finance before high school graduation. (4)

Now consider the extent to which we as Americans are living on the edge, quite literally:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans today live paycheck to paycheck. (5)

36% of U.S. adults report that they would have difficulty covering a $400 emergency expense. (6)

67% of Gen Y (commonly defined as those born between 1980 and 1994) have less than 3 months' worth of emergency funds on hand. (7)

For us as a country to put ourselves in a better position to withstand future periods of economic difficulty, and for us as kids to put ourselves in a better position when we become adults to successfully manage our own financial lives and more comfortably withstand periods of personal financial difficulty, it is essential that we develop the skills, knowledge of personal finance, and habits that ultimately can lead to our financial well-being as adults.