In this episode, Ben Harwood interviews Julian Wise ’24, a senior majoring in Economics and Environmental Science at Skidmore College, about his initiative to create a website promoting financial literacy resources for Skidmore students and employees. Wise’s passion for financial literacy began at age 16 when he started listening to financial literacy podcasts during the COVID-19 pandemic. He discovered The Great Courses, a collection of educational courses on various topics, and particularly enjoyed those on financial literacy and investments. After taking a Bridge Experience course about libraries and social justice with Professor and College Librarian Marta Brunner, Wise was further inspired to develop the website independently. The podcast also highlights Wise’s collaboration with Skidmore faculty, staff and students, including the Student Government Association (SGA), the Opportunity Program (OP), and the Career Development Center, to incorporate financial literacy into the first-year experience curriculum and support students preparing to graduate. Wise aims to equip Skidmore students with the tools and knowledge to manage their finances effectively and build a secure financial future. He shares his journey of learning about financial literacy, investing, and the importance of understanding financial concepts such as debt management and savings. Wise emphasizes the lack of financial literacy education in schools and the need for accessible resources, which motivated him to create the website to help his peers access financial literacy courses, particularly through the Saratoga Springs Public Library, which offers free access to The Great Courses.

Ben Harwood: Hello world. Welcome to the SkidCreate podcast. I’m Ben Harwood, instructional designer here in LEDS in the Lucy Scribner Library.

Today we’re going to talk about financial literacy and a digital website that a student created on the subject.

So, Julian, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your project?

Julian Wise: Absolutely. First off, thank you so much for having me here.

It’s a pleasure to be with you today. My name is Julian Wise.

I’m an economics and environmental science major here at Skidmore.

I’m a senior, so I’m class of 2024. Financial literacy has always been a passion of mine.

I started listening to my first financial literacy podcast when I was 16 and during the pandemic.

COVID hit when I was 17. So, right before I was able to invest on my 18th birthday, I was going through the library website,

my local hometown library of Reading, Massachusetts, and I came across these courses called The Great Courses.

I wondered what those were, so I did a little more digging.

These great courses are a collection of over 800 different courses on a variety of topics.

I was scrolling through. I’ve always been interested in financial literacy.

I used to listen to this podcast occasionally titled, “Money for the Rest of Us,” by J. David Stein.

I highly recommend it. I stumbled upon the business section under skills.

There’s a section dedicated to financial literacy classes.

I started watching one titled, “Understanding Investments.” I fell in love with it.

During the pandemic, people had a lot of extra time.

This was March of 2020, and I was a junior in high school.

I didn’t really have a lot of homework and was looking for something to do.

I started binge-watching these great course episodes.

Fast forward a couple of months, I had watched a couple of episodes. I was interested. A couple of episodes turned into a couple of series,

which turned into me being very excited to turn 18 so I could open a retirement account.

It is not super common for an 18-year-old, but that’s where I have been able to

pursue my passion. I’m not saying I’m going to retire by age 30. I still need to build up my account,

but that’s where the onus started.

As I started to invest, I bought a couple of stocks here and there. Seeing my portfolio grow

is interesting and fulfilling, especially to look back and see where I started from.

Both my parents are chefs. I come from a middle-class household. I didn’t have access to

financial literacy resources through any professional realm or official pathway.

I am grateful that there are these courses out there, but they are not well known.

I had to search for them.

Ben Harwood: Okay, so great courses you came across.

Were there any other courses on there that caught your attention, caught your eye?

Julian Wise: Both my parents are chefs. They have some great courses on teaching people how to cook. The president of Skidmore College, Marc Conner, teaches a couple of courses on there.

Oh, wow. About Irish poetry and Shakespeare.

So there’s a wide range of topics.

If you’re interested in weightlifting, there are weightlifting courses. If you’re interested in poetry or learning how to write, etc.

There’s a wide variety. You could spend your entire life watching all those courses!

Ben Harwood: Wow. So during the pandemic, you watched Great Courses, particularly on the topic of financial literacy, and you’ve become financially literate.

I think, for an 18-year-old Skidmore student. What’s your sense of the average Skidmore student,

but let’s say young people in their early 20s in general?

Is the population financially literate in your experience?

Julian Wise: That’s a fantastic question. To sum it up, I would say no.

Unfortunately, financial literacy is not taught in schools.

I did a financial literacy course in middle school, but it was basically a joke.

We did some online course. I didn’t take anything away from that class.

I wouldn’t say after completing that class that I was financially literate.

It’s an unfortunate reality that a lot of people don’t know

about even something as simple as investing.

What’s indexing? We’ll get into all of that in a little bit.

Even just talking with family, friends, and my peers at Skidmore,

a lot of them want to know about financial literacy, but they don’t know how!

Showing people where to access resources is incredibly important.

That’s what started my onus for this website, which we’ll get into in a little bit.

Ben Harwood: All right. If you had to sum it up very briefly, what is financial literacy?

Julian Wise: That’s a great question. When I think about financial literacy, I think about the movement of money.

Think of a bank account as a “stock,” not in the stock market sense, but as a collection of a resource.

What comes into your bank account is your income, your inflows.

For most Americans, this is a paycheck. Your outflows include five buckets. The first is paying your taxes.

There is no way around that. The second is paying off debt.

Especially as a college student, I have student loans.

Throughout life, you’re probably going to have debt, whether it be a car loan, a mortgage, etc.

There are two ways to pay off debt. One is the avalanche method, and the other is the snowball method.

The avalanche method means you’re paying off your high-interest loans first,

whereas the snowball method is you’re paying off your smallest debts first.

Ben Harwood: Which one is better?

Julian Wise: That’s a great question.

When I think about the word better in terms of paying off debt, it depends on your end goal.

If you have loans across a variety of categories, like credit card loans, student loans, a mortgage, you would be paying off your loan with the highest interest first, regardless of the loan balance.

This is the cheapest method,

so you’d be paying the least amount of money because your high-interest loans are accumulating interest faster than all the other loans.

The snowball method means paying off your smallest debts first.

The difference between these two methods in terms of outcome is psychology.

I’m not a psychology major, but it’s important that we understand that.

If we see and get overwhelmed by the amount of loans we have,

is it more likely that we’ll continue with a plan if we see progress by paying off small loans?

Small wins versus large overwhelming debts.

Choose whatever method will get you to a point where you will pay off all your debt, because eventually, that’s the end goal.

You want to pay off all your debt. Moving to the third bucket, you’re paying your taxes, paying off debt, saving in a private retirement account.

A private retirement account is different from Social Security.

For many Americans, Social Security is not enough. A private retirement account could be a 401(k), a Roth IRA.

There are many retirement accounts; this is not an exhaustive list.

If you work for a nonprofit, you may have a different retirement account.

But it’s all the same premise: you put in either pretax or post-tax dollars, and then you go from there.

The fourth bucket is saving for future expenses. This is different from investing because this is liquid money.

You want to take part of your income and save it for a rainy day fund.

You want to have an emergency spare expense.

Let’s say you have a car maintenance issue and need to come up with $800.

I recommend having two different savings accounts.

A traditional savings account if you’re saving for a vacation, and an emergency one that you don’t touch, just in case you need it in the future.

It’s important to differentiate between savings and investing.

Investing is putting money in a brokerage account, or most likely for Americans, putting it into a retirement account.

You can’t touch that money before you retire unless you’re willing to pay penalties.

Savings is just putting money in a savings account.

Liquid assets. Investing is putting money in a retirement account or any sort of brokerage account.

The fifth bucket is current income.

Some of the best financial advice I ever received was from Professor Fong Camp, a lecturer through the Great Courses.

He talks about the importance of valuing spending money today versus putting money in the future.

This is known as the time valuation of money. He used a shoe box analogy.

If you put money in a shoe box and give it to future you, would future you value it more than present you and vice versa?

You don’t want to save 100% of your income in a retirement account and not enjoy your life today.

Financial literacy is understanding these five outflows of your money and properly allocating it so you enjoy life today while being mindful of your future.

Most people don’t want to be working into their 70s.

You want to have the option to retire when you’re 65 or later, but planning to be debt-free by the time you retire is important.

Ben Harwood: Why is financial literacy important?

Julian Wise: Life will never go according to plan.

There will always be bumps along the road and emergency expenses, which relates to having emergency savings accounts.

The goal of financial literacy is to create an automatic outflow plan. You look at those five buckets and choose where to allocate your money.

The key word is automatic.

I don’t believe budgets are effective for most people.

Create a plan in which, when you get your paycheck or income, you have automatic payments for taxes, savings, and debt.

You can set up automatic payments so it goes to your retirement account or savings account for expenses.

This is an example of taking active steps to save and have a better financial future.

Engage in dollar-cost averaging, where you set aside money on a specific day each month to automatically invest in index funds.

Index funds are great because they reduce risk. There are two types of risk when investing: systematic risk and unsystematic risk.

Systematic risk is the entire stock market collapsing, like during the 2008 financial crisis.

Unsystematic risk is one company collapsing.

You can’t protect against systematic

risk, but you can protect against unsystematic risk by indexing.

For example, you can’t buy the S&P 500, but you can buy a portion of an index fund that tracks the S&P 500.

These funds are passively managed, which means lower fees.

Actively managed funds have higher fees because they are managed by an outside person.

Passive index funds invest in all the companies in the index they track.

This protects against unsystematic risk because if one company in the S&P 500 doesn’t do well or goes out of business, your account is protected by the other 499 companies.

It’s important to talk to friends and family about financials.

Ask them how they feel about retiring. Are they nervous?

Most people don’t know a lot about financials or the importance of having an emergency savings account.

I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t expect someone to know something they aren’t taught or don’t have access to.

I majored in economics, but you don’t need to be an economics major to be an investor.

I invested in the stock market before I was an economics major.

There are many basic concepts you can learn.

Financial literacy is a prime example of innovation.

Before the dotcom bubble and the internet, you needed to go through a broker to invest, which charged high fees.

Now, you can invest on your own through online accounts.

The Great Courses is an online lecture series.

I’m not sponsored by the Great Courses, but I genuinely think they are the best financial literacy courses available.

You have many resources on your computer to invest and save for retirement.

It’s about getting the word out there and accessing them.

Ben Harwood: Improving access to building financial literacy led you to pursue a project by building a website?

Julian Wise: Absolutely. I’m going to switch over to the website on my computer.

I’ve always been passionate about financial literacy, but two people made this project through Skidmore possible.

The first is Professor Brunner. She teaches a bridge class.

At Skidmore, you’re required to take a bridge class that helps you gain exposure to social justice issues across the country.

One of the things we learned in that class is, who are libraries for?

Who are the constituents of the library and the Skidmore College Library?

It’s mainly Skidmore students, but it’s also open to faculty, staff, alumni, and retirees.

The resources that Skidmore subscribes to are geared toward Skidmore students.

This social justice aspect was the onus for this project.

I talked to Professor Brunner at the beginning of the school year in September 2023 about improving financial aid resources at Skidmore.

Skidmore doesn’t subscribe to the Great Courses,

but the Saratoga Springs Public Library, which all Skidmore students have access to, subscribes to the Great Courses.

I talked to her about how I could get the word out about this.

She recommended me to you, Ben.

Here at Skidmore College.

Looking at this website, the goal is to make it simple and easy to access.

We even removed the search bar. There are only four pages.

The goal is that any Skidmore student can take the bus to Skidmore, use their Skidmore card,

go to the Saratoga Springs Public Library in downtown Saratoga Springs,

get a library card, and follow the steps to access the Great Courses.

Create an online account through Kanopy, search for the Great Courses, and watch the courses I recommend: Understanding Investments,

Money Management Skills, and How to Plan for the Perfect Retirement.

These are the first courses I watched during the pandemic. They are the trifecta of financial literacy.

I’ve worked with different offices. On the acknowledgments page, you can see I worked with Professor Brunner and President Connor.

I also worked with the Skidmore Opportunity Program, the Student Government Association, and the social science librarian.

This website will be incorporated into the first-year experience curriculum for fall 2024.

Every Skidmore student is required to take a Scribner class, an introduction class for freshmen.

The fourth credit hour is designed to help students adjust to college. This will be included in the first year, which is wonderful.

I also talked to Zach at the Career Development Center to get this included for people getting ready to graduate.

I’m a college student myself. I don’t have the money to put too much into my retirement account.

But the goal is to build these skills in college.

Skidmore College is fantastic. The Career Development Center is great at helping people find a job.

Use the money you make in that job to save and allocate toward retirement.

Ben Harwood: Julian Wise, thank you so much for creating this website and for coming on the podcast.