This morning I had the opportunity to give a forty-minute presentation about personal finance basics to a Penn State freshman seminar class.  One of my (many) long-term goals is to fix the lack of personal finance education at the high school and college level, so I jumped at the chance and dragged myself out of bed at 3AM to prepare a presentation.

I gave and recorded the presentation using Google Hangouts On Air:


The presentation is here and the spreadsheets referenced in the video are available here.

Unfortunately the audio on the other end wasn't working, so I was not able to do the question-and-answer session that I had planned.  In lieu of that, I'll follow up with the students using a Google Form to collect their questions and I'll post the answers here.

I have been subscribing to a lot more YouTube content lately, and I like the concept of preparing a series of short personal finance videos to add at the top of my posts here.  These videos could give the tl;dr version for people who prefer the sound of my voice to my writing style (what a choice!).

My public speaking needs work, but to be fair this was 6AM my time...

For every hour I've spent learning about and carrying out the act of financial investment, I've probably spent 100 hours in classrooms, doing homework, reading textbooks, and taking notes.

I just entered 20th grade: 12 years up through highschool, 5 years of undergraduate, and now I've just begun my third year of graduate school.  However much I've accumulated in mutual funds, my education has been by far my most sizable investment in terms of time, money, and personal effort.



Had I been working all of those years instead, I could have amassed quite a bit of money by now.  Getting a good return on this massive investment has always been a high priority.