Dan Hebert is president of the New Hampshire Jump$tart Coalition.

Last week, Winnacunnet High School won the New Hampshire Jump$tart FinLit300 State Championship. Students from Bow High School, Founders Academy, Goffstown High School, Newfound Regional High School, Raymond High School, and Winnacunnet High School answered questions like, “Using the rule of 72, approximately how many years will it take an investment to double in value if it earns an 8% annualized rate of return?” and “Which asset class has the lowest long-term historical return?”

Be honest: could you have correctly answered those questions while in high school?

These students recognize that the costs of financial illiteracy are high and growing for young adults. WalletHub last year ranked New Hampshire as the state with the most student loan indebtedness in the country, with the Education Data Initiative finding that our residents owe an average of $34,085, for a whopping total of $6.5 billion in debt for state residents.

Homeownership is becoming increasingly difficult in today’s economy, and recent market turmoil ranging from the pandemic-fueled inflation to global banking uncertainty does not provide hope for a steadier financial situation anytime soon. But financial education is among the things that we can control, and that can help us build a more secure and equitable financial future for our children.

As a longtime financial education advocate at the nonprofit New Hampshire Jump$tart Coalition, I’m proud that New Hampshire has a requirement designating personal finance as a fundamental part of an adequate education, and that Governor Sununu has proclaimed April as Financial Literacy Month in recognition that “acquisition of financial literacy skills by New Hampshire youth will improve the quality of their lives as adults, will provide them with skills for success, will contribute to positive changes for the communities in which they live and work, and will benefit the economy of this state.”

Current efforts to improve financial education, however, sometimes overlook a key audience: younger children. Children in elementary and middle school are forming money habits; starting to use debit cards, digital currencies and peer-to-peer payment systems; and are affected by the spending and savings habits of their families, for better or, too often, for worse. Starting financial education earlier is critical to helping our children cope with the increasingly complicated financial landscape that they will inevitably face.

Such lessons should be engaging and age-appropriate, having relevance to age-appropriate everyday concepts. For example, New Hampshire Jump$tart volunteers help second graders begin the habit of savings through our “I Can Save!” campaign, a fun, interactive session that gives students the opportunity to learn the importance of saving, spending and sharing while exploring the differences between “needs” and “wants.”

Ensuring that our children have effective financial education, however, requires the involvement and training of our teachers. While many of us expect teachers to have all the answers, many of them also struggle with a lack of financial education. A study from the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center found that 90 percent of teachers believe that financial education should be a priority in school, but only half of the teachers surveyed reported feeling familiar enough with personal finance subject matter to teach it confidently. That’s something that can be remedied by the host of free and low-cost training and resources provided by the trusted nonprofits, government organizations, and corporations that are united under the Jump$tart banner to advance effective classroom-based financial education nationwide.

There are a multitude of things that we cannot control in our children’s lives. But by asking their school to teach effective financial education starting in elementary school, we can at least help them be better prepared for the financial realities they will face.

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