Welcome back to our Personal Finance series, where in Part 1 we talked about what financial literacy looks like and in Part 2 we will be taking a closer look at ways we can teach certain money concepts. 

Financial concepts can feel abstract at times even when we rely on them day to day, and it can be easy to get lost in the weeds when thinking about how to communicate those concepts to students. 

How can we introduce these concepts in a way that helps to instill the positive financial habits that come with understanding them without overloading on information or accidentally pulling focus toward a more opaque system of “rules?”

It can be tempting in that context to stick to topics that are more concrete, such as being able to interpret and count currency, but it is so important that we talk about concepts that are relevant to real-world day-to-day life when many Autistic students wish to have enough financial independence in adulthood to make those decisions for themselves. 

So let’s take a look at some common financial concepts and some basic ideas for introducing them in a classroom setting!

Although we referenced counting money as a limited approach to financial literacy in our introduction, it is still a relevant example when it comes to learning to make purchases in the real world. 

The problem comes when we stop there, because cash transactions are just a portion of all the ways one might purchase something. What about purchasing with a debit card in a store? What about setting up transactions on a new website? What about the vast array of virtual wallets that are now available and can often act in the place of a card? 

Each of these methods of transaction is worthy of a small primer, as well as a strategy for considering one’s available money when making purchase decisions. It is also a great time to remind students that while the penalty for not having enough cash might simply be the inability to purchase an item, with card or virtual transactions it can result in overdraft penalties. 

Having strategies for reminding oneself to check ahead of time and have a quick way of doing so is just as if not more important than being able to count dollar bills and coins! As straightforward as the mechanics of the transactions themselves can be, explaining the various forms it can take, and offering tools for remembering the steps when necessary, can make a big difference!

Monthly budgets might seem fairly simple on the surface once you get the hang of it and have the luxury of some trial and error, but to people who have never budgeted before it might feel like a bigger, more labyrinthine concept than it really is. 

While not every classroom might have occasion for events where a spending budget is part of the process, it is worth considering those opportunities when they come along, and it can also be a fun way to offer the class more of a say in whatever event might require a budget. It’s something we touch on in our 5 part series on classroom businesses , but it’s possible to do even with something like a small class party. Are we bringing treats? 

Students could pick from a pool of possible treats at various price points to fit within the available budget. Considering a variety of activities? You could determine the cost of a few different ones ahead of time and offer a similar choice. 

As the concept of fitting within a budget becomes more concrete it can be that much more straightforward to talk about how we keep track of our own expenses, especially across the variety of transactions we might perform day to day.

There are a lot of different concepts we can study to optimize our choice if a line of credit is right for us, but perhaps more crucial than identifying the best interest rates and perks is instilling in students why lines of credit are more about financing emergencies or a planned larger purchase than about day to day purchases. 

Students often learn at a young age that splurging on fun stuff with credit can be a costly long term decision, but it might not seem as obvious why it’s advisable to avoid putting more necessary daily living expenses on a card if at all possible. Most crucially, lines of credit have limits and when you hit your limit that line of credit becomes purely an expense. 

So if you spend your line of credit meeting day to day needs, even though it’s not reckless spending, in the longer term you eventually won’t have that credit to bridge the gap and even worse will have to pay more money on top of that to keep up with your debt. 

Singular emergencies or planned larger purchases on the other hand can be incorporated into a budget and more easily paid off over time.

There are a lot of different concepts we can study to optimize our choice if a line of credit is right for us, but perhaps more crucial than identifying the best interest rates and perks is instilling in students why lines of credit are more about financing emergencies or a planned larger purchase than about day to day purchases. 

Students often learn at a young age that splurging on fun stuff with credit can be a costly long term decision, but it might not seem as obvious why it’s advisable to avoid putting more necessary daily living expenses on a card if at all possible. Most crucially, lines of credit have limits and when you hit your limit that line of credit becomes purely an expense. 

So if you spend your line of credit meeting day to day needs, even though it’s not reckless spending, in the longer term you eventually won’t have that credit to bridge the gap and even worse will have to pay more money on top of that to keep up with your debt. 

Singular emergencies or planned larger purchases on the other hand can be incorporated into a budget and more easily paid off over time.

Much like lines of credit, investing in another area where there are lots of parables floating around about the moral goodness of investing in one’s future and the wrongness of speculative gambling, and to the outside observer it can be hard to suss out the practical reasons why one type of investment might be seen as responsible and the other is reckless. 

One helpful way to conceptualize the money one might invest with is to think of it as “your future.” Money for your future is money you want to be able to rely on later in life. One reality of investing is that any investment can fail, and whoever voluntarily took that risk is ultimately responsible for their own decisions. But some investments are far more stable than others, and in exchange for that stability you are much more likely to see small consistent growth than major gains. 

This is the case with US treasury bonds, and it is the case with many investment portfolios that set clients up with long term investments across a variety of companies so that no one failure is likely to affect the overall investment. Alternately, investments like trying to make big short term profits on the stock market might yield a higher short term reward but also pose a bigger threat of loss. 

People choosing whether to make speculative investments in the stock market or even more volatile markets like cryptocurrency must ask themselves if they are willing to potentially give up their future for the possibility of getting lucky, or whether those types of investments might be better suited to disposable income like one might spend on a hobby or entertainment.

We hope that distilling these financial concepts down to some basic objectives has spurred some additional thoughts on ways to communicate those concerts in the classroom. 

Next week we will talk about when to teach some of these concepts and how to build on them as we talk about stages of personal finance. 

In the meantime if you’d like to see us cover other areas of this topic more in depth we’d love to hear from you! Just drop us a line as hello@autismgrownup.com and we will be back next Monday!