Personal Finance for Educators

As I continue experimenting with the Personal Finance for Educators Project , I’m trying different approaches to the content—sometimes diving into a specific financial tool, other times reflecting more broadly on the teaching lifestyle. My hope is that the blog and podcast together provide spaces for expanding on ideas, sharing resources, and connecting the dots between topics. The goal is to offer both quick takeaways and deeper reflections that help educators make more confident financial choices. PFE Episode 4 In Episode 4 of the Personal Finance for Educators Podcast , I took a different approach and created a screencast that walks through an employee handbook. My aim was to demonstrate how reviewing a handbook can help you identify useful resources. When you start a new teaching job, chances are someone gives you a link to an employee handbook during orientation. Many of us file it away because we’re focused on the task at hand (e.g., classroom prep, curriculum...

With the school year approaching, I wanted to make a post for folks who might be starting a new teaching job and feeling overwhelmed with everything. First, congratulations! You’ve joined a wonderful profession! Thank you for the time, dedication, and heart that you've already committed. When it comes to personal finance, my experience has been that new teachers often get minimal guidance related to benefits. Unless you are someone who enjoys digging through pdfs, reading spreadsheets, and examining fine print*, you likely won't have much engagement with specifics apart from surface-level comments at an orientation meeting. This is problematic because the benefit decisions you make now can have significant short-term and long-term financial consequence. Moreover, as I mentioned in  Focus Less on Numbers,  the first few years in the teaching profession can be overwhelming as you learn the trade (e.g., lesson planning, assessment, classroom management) and navigate big life chan...

In a previous post,  The Pension Path , I shared an overview of the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) and how it works. In this post, I’m taking the next step: exploring a scenario along this path. My goal is to help folks understand how to estimate a pension benefit and how it might fit into a broader financial strategy. I’m a mathematics educator, not a financial advisor, and this post is meant for educational purposes only—like everything else on this site. If your financial journey includes traveling the pension path, then I think you should, at a minimum, understand what this path looks like. If you are part of the WRS and have never looked at  WRS Retirement Benefit Page , consider this a homework assignment. If you are part of another pension system and reading this blog, you are likewise charged to explore your benefits. Although waiting to understand how a system works the last few years of employment might work out fine, I think it very likely you will have missed o...