Personal Finance for Educators

Where are you headed? One of my favorite quotes as of late is “All models are wrong, some are useful,” which is generally attributed to a British statistician named Dr. George Box. I take it to mean that in our desire to understand things, humans inevitably try to create a model of the phenomenon under study. Although models are useful, they are simplified approximations of a thing. At best, they describe or predict facets of the phenomenon. But I think e very model will eventually have a point where is ceases to be useful.  Please keep that in mind as you read the rest of this post. In order to focus my discussion of personal finance, I'm going to consider a model  that focuses on the interplay of three things: behavior, goals, and mathematics. Together, these three are components of one's personal finance journey. Goals set the destination. They are where you think you want to go right now. Goals might change along the way as you experience the journey. Mathematics outl...

You are not a number My daughter Caroline's popsicle stick me and her. As a mathematics educator, I think a lot (probably too much) about how numbers influence the way we see the world. I see the influence of numbers all over in my professional and personal life. Folks take a complex and nuanced phenomena and try to simplify or reduce the thing by assigning a number. Assigning the number isn’t really the problem though. It’s how quickly folks can lose sight of what the numbers represent. They then operate on the numbers as if they were context free and not connected to complex people, ideas, beliefs, etc. It’s easy to get fixated on making big numbers bigger or making small numbers smaller. When bigness or smallness becomes the focus, we can lose sight of ourselves and values in pursuit of efficiency. I also see folks reason passionately about quantities that are familiar (e.g., ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, quarters, halves, tenths, hundredths) and get hand wavy about numbers w...

Say hello to our little dog Murphy :D  Testing 1, 2, 3... yep, it's on. Hello friends,  This is the first entry in what I hope will be an interesting project focused on helping educators on their path to financial stability. I've put together a bare bones website, purchased a domain name, and I'm in the processing of getting a podcast together. So I guess that's something? My journey to help others with personal finance has seemed to suddenly increase the last few months. It might seem like it came out of nowhere, but I think it is just an example of compounding in real life. Things start slowly, you learn about topics, you connect with resources, start to make connections, and it all builds on itself. Unlike compounding in finance, I'm not planning to allow this project to grow exponentially as I still have a job to do during the academic year, a young family, and a variety of other commitments. However, I think linear growth might be something I can manage (shout-...