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A Tool for Teaching Financial Literacy

If you’re like me, you want to teach your children about managing finances before they leave home. My husband and I made so many financial mistakes early in our marriage—mistakes that we might have known not to make with some training ahead of time. Back then, though, (We’ve been married for 22 years.) there wasn’t much available. Thankfully, that’s not the case now.

Second Nature Learning Logo Enlarged

I recently had the chance to use and review a program called Budgeteer Notes, which is produced by the folks at Second Nature Learning. I jumped at the chance because I have a 16-year-old son who just started working a part-time job. Now is the perfect time to teach him about money management and making wise financial choices. It won’t be too many more years until he’ll be responsible for making all of his own choices and living with the consequences!

Budgeteer Notes is available for purchase in two places: The App Store  and on Google Play.  The cost is $3.99. I don’t often comment on prices and how affordable a resource is because what’s affordable to one person may not be to another, but for $3.99, that’s a great price for nearly anyone! If you’re interested in a group purchase, you can email [email protected]  or [email protected].

There are a few little bits of information you’ll probably want to know before you purchase Budgeteer Notes to be sure it will work on your device(s). First, it will work very well on your desktop or laptop computer. If you want to use it on an iPad or Android tablet, though, you’ll need to have a 10” or 10.1” screen. Second, you will need WiFi in order to use it.

Budgeteer App

After using this program, I can say that it is a very good tool for beginning to teach your student(s) about financial literacy. I also think it would work for students who are younger—maybe middle-school or so up to teens. Each activity is fairly short, the computer-generated graphics are colorful, and even though the voice is a computerized, it’s easy to understand and pleasant to listen to. The entire program takes about 45 minutes to an hour to work through, but I think it would be a good idea to go through it more than once if possible. It includes short videos giving the basic information/idea, and that is followed by either an interactive activity or a real-life scenario to give the student immediate practice at using what he or she just learned.

The version that I used was an earlier version. Since then, a note-taking feature has been added. I think that’s a wonderful improvement since many of us are hands-on learners and need to do something with information in order to remember it. Also, a note-taking feature will make it easier for students to look back over what they’ve learned in order to study it and help get it “cemented” into their brains since they will certainly need it later on!

I personally think this is a very helpful program—especially for students who haven’t done any kind of budgeting or financial literacy curriculum before. I do think it would be a good idea to follow this up with something a little more in-depth if possible. Or, if you’d rather, you could simply discuss the information learned in this program and discuss how it applies to that student’s life or how it could apply in the future.

If you’d like to take a look at a few screen shots of the app, just go to the website, Second Nature Learning, and scroll down just a tiny bit. You’ll see a few screen shots with a brief comment about what’s being shown on that screen shot.

You can find Second Nature Learning on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

NOTE: I received this app free of charge for the purpose of using it and writing this review.

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