Schwab targets teens with Moneywise America

Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz has been on a crusade for 25 years to help children become more financially savvy.

She may have a solution.

It’s called Moneywise America, a money management curriculum launched in mid-September by the Charles Schwab Foundation with the goal of making personal finance courses available to every middle and high school in the country by 2025.

The stakes couldn’t be higher, with young adults facing money problems that could haunt them for life, ranging from mountains of student loan debts to mismanaged credit cards. Teens can’t count on learning the financial fundamentals in school, given that less than half of states require high school students to take a financial education class in order to graduate.

Schwab-Pomerantz, the daughter of investment titan Charles Schwab, is president of the Charles Schwab Foundation, whose mission statement is to help people of all ages become financially fit through education.

I talked to Schwab-Pomerantz shortly after the unveiling of Moneywise America. She provided details about the program — which is broader than several other personal finance programs supported by her foundation — and also discussed why financial education is so important, and even how she helped her three children learn to handle money when they were youngsters.

Moneywise America, which is free, is geared to 13- to 18-year-olds — what Schwab-Pomerantz calls the “sweet spot” for when kids should really be soaking up more about saving, spending and budgeting.

The financial literacy program is targeting kids from lower-income households and “under-resourced” schools that don’t have the time, money or access to personal finance curriculum, Schwab-Pomerantz said.

“Their needs are just the same as all of ours,” she said. “They need to establish good money habits right out of the gate.”

The content in Moneywise America is certainly relevant to teens — covering topics such as budgeting, credit cards, borrowing, saving, taxes and investing responsibly for the long-term.

While Schwab-Pomerantz acknowledged the obstacles of reaching kids on a large scale because of the pandemic, the curriculum is designed to be taught in-person or virtually.

Teaching this ambitious program will be Schwab employees, who will undergo training before becoming volunteer instructors, she said. So far, about 400 of the brokerage firm’s employees have signed up to help, Schwab-Pomerantz said.

In addition to schools, Moneywise America lessons will be offered to nonprofit organizations. For example, the Girl Scouts of America is partnering with the Schwab foundation to expand financial literacy programs beginning in late 2022.

“We aim to make financial illiteracy a national priority,” Schwab-Pomerantz said. “Everyone needs to be a part of it ... schools, nonprofits, government. That’s what we’re trying to do, make financial literacy part of the national lexicon.”

What can parents do? Take an idea or two from Schwab-Pomerantz’s playbook: When her kids were five or six, they started getting an allowance. When they turned 10, she took them to the bank to open a savings account. At age 12, her kids opened investment accounts and learned about long-term investing. And when they had high school jobs during the summer, they opened Roth IRA’s.

At the very least, I might add, talk to your kids about money.