By: Laura Walton AFC® Definition: Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you’re thinking in order to make your thinking better. Really? I started down the rabbit hole of critical thinking after reading an answer given by Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard and champion of index funds. Asked if he’d read an article that…
By: Laura Walton AFC® These last few days of 2016 are a time of both reflection on the year just ending and anticipation of the year to come. The following is meant to prompt some fun as well as thoughtful answers as we look back and ahead. If you had to give 2016 a theme,…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Last month I attended Social Venture Partners Fast Pitch event at which seven select non-profits competed to inspire the audience through their stories, told in just three minutes, their “fast pitches.” The speakers for each non-profit did just that – they inspired – and so did the keynote speaker, a former…
By: Laura Walton AFC® That was my reaction when I saw the article titled “Financial Illiteracy and the Ineffectiveness of Financial Education Programs.” The TCI Foundation runs a financial education program, the 3rd Decade. Are we irrelevant? No, thank goodness, but… the eye-opening take-away from this was that financial education only affected 0.1% of later financial…
By: Laura Walton AFC® I spent yesterday morning talking about investing with a high school Personal Finance class. This is a classroom that the TCI Foundation has been visiting for the past three years – this time was different. Many teachers use The Stock Market Game and their teacher had received a grant to bring…
By: Laura Walton AFC® With Thanksgiving behind us (I hope you enjoyed yours) and 24/7 holiday music everywhere, let’s have fun with some holiday facts. First, the most expensive Christmas card… Apparently the Christmas card was conceived as a way to encourage ordinary folks to use the Post Office! In 1843, Sir Henry Cole asked…
By: Laura Walton AFC® I often say this isn’t “rocket surgery” – personal finance really just boils down to spending less than you make over your lifetime. On the other hand, that’s easier said than done. Maybe, one day, my blog will detail all the financial mistakes I’ve made along the way. Want to know the most…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Did you know that there is a government unit, the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, dedicated to improving the effectiveness of government programs by better understanding how we make decisions? Maya Shankar, senior policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, assembled the SBST team of 35…
By: Laura Walton AFC® We’ve all experienced sticker shock at the grocery store now and then so it came as a big surprise to me that our spending on food is a fraction of what it has been historically. Today we spend about 13% of our income on food. In 1900, we spent 43%! And, we find…
By: Laura Walton AFC® I often say that wealth is built at the margins – a little bit saved here and there consistently over the years rather than the home run bet on just the right stock at the right time. Americans admit they waste money on inconsequential stuff but just how much and how…