My Story

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I had been teaching my own kids and other kids for 15 years when I was leading the teen program in a local homeschool coop.

I was looking for ideas that weren’t the usual courses- I didn’t want to do algebra or English lit. I wanted to do something different, something that might excite or inspire a group of high school aged youth. I wanted it to be meaningful for them.

I had the aha moment to create a class about real life math- how to budget, along with basic financial concepts. I decided to call the course Live Skills Math because it was real living skills and we could all use them in our day to day lives.

I created the program base- a budget to do each class for 12 weeks.  Each week represented one month.  This way we could complete a whole year of budgets and see how the students fared over the year.

The second portion of the program involved sharing key financial concepts such as savings, debt, interest, investing and more.  The students learned how the concepts worked and why they mattered to them.

The program evolved and changed over the last 10 years but those teens inspired its creation and the foundation upon which the course was built.  Thanks to those teens for helping me to make this program to help so many kids become financially literate.