While kicking around ideas for community involvement with my employer (a bank within our community) I mentioned that financial literacy started early and that I would love for us to begin teaching the youth in our community about it.

For right now the program is Wide Open. As in we have the go ahead to talk with someone on the school board about it.

Is anyone invovled in anything similiar in your communities?

Any resources you would recommend?

What do you say we cover?

Recognizing different denominations of currency? How a savings account works? What interest is? I know this may all vary depending on ages.

I am very excited to be involved with this and look forward to getting some ideas.

If it were up to me the first thing I would drive home to these kids is to live below their means.

What age range would you be teaching? I'd have different ideas for grade school kids versus junior high versus high school.

One of the biggest concepts kids need to learn is delayed gratification. Too often kids have grown up wanting something and getting it instantly. They need to learn to set a goal and save for items they want to purchase. Doing this also teaches them that by waiting they may also find that the item isn't as important to them as they first thought.

I've done work with Junior Achievement, which has a good age-based curriculum that starts with recognizing money and how it is tied to work and later, investments. They also do lessons on savings, delayed gratification, the power of compound interest (both for and against), and money as freedom (that's for high schoolers).

The problem with JA, is that while good, it is really made by the middle class for the middle class - alot of the lessons are really completely absurd sounding to working class and poor kids (getting an allowance that would allow you to buy an ipod in 6 months, for example.) I'd love to see a similar program or even a new JA mission to adapt this to other groups.