Tag: levelup

Things I Know 283 of 365: Financial literacy is digital too

It’s never too early to teach kids about properly managing their money.

– Ken Chaplin, senior vice president of Experian Consumer Direct

I spent a bit of time this evening checking out the Secret Millionaires Club. The site from Warren Buffett is designed to help kids build financial literacy and provide parents and teachers with resources for building those skills. The few cartoons I watched kept my attention and embedded their message in an easily-understood manner. If I were bringing up a kid or teaching basic personal finance in 2005, I’d definitely use the site.

***

The other day, I walked in to my local coffee shop for a muffin and a coffee. The sign hanging from the register alerted my fellow patrons and I we could only pay with cash. Through some mixup with the phone system, the line was dead and credit card purchases couldn’t be processed.

I had no cash.

I still managed to get my muffin and coffee with no cash changing hands. I didn’t even have to wash dishes.

I pulled out my phone, opened my LevelUp app and the store’s cell phone snapped a pic of my personalized QR code. Seconds later, I received a text with my digital receipt (preset tip included). Later, I found a matching e-mail for my records. Each time I spend $60 at the shop, I earn a $6 credit.

***

A few weeks ago, I was at dinner with some friends and learned about Venmo. Users set up an account and are able to network payments to friends. The idea here is making it easier to move money back and forth when you split a check over anything. If you carry a balance from friends when you picked up the check, that’s the money (not your linked account) that gets moved to friends. The service is almost an intermediary bank.

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This is to say nothing of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s customer-side service attached to his latest venture – Square. Enabled on iPhones and Android phones, the app knows when you enter a Square-enabled establishment and opens a tab when you walk in the door. According to Square’s website, “Give the cashier your name at checkout. Pay without touching your phone or wallet.”

***

Time was, a financial literacy curriculum could be considered forward-thinking if it gave passing mention to PayPal. PayPal is old news now. What counts as money and how people interact with it are shifting concepts. While each of the services I’ve mentioned here purport and appear to be safer and more trustworthy than a credit card, I have much to learn before I can know that for certain.

What’s more, all of these are shifts to the foundation of financial literacy missing from Buffett’s lessons. I know my grandparents will never dream of signing up for any of these services. For any child born in the last 5 years, though, a wallet will likely be something on whatever turns out to be the equivalent of a cell phone. (Cows and whatever animal we get velcro from can breathe a sigh of relief.)

With recent signs pointing to the idea people had no idea what they were doing operating under the “business as usual” model, perhaps we should get head start on teaching kids about “business as unusual.”

Things I Know 228 of 365: I’m developing new work and life flows

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

– Igor Stravinsky

The last 48 hours have been a reminder of the future in which we live.

Yesterday, when completing an assignment for one of my classes, I needed only to open a google doc to see the notes for the readings I hadn’t done.

Through e-mail, my reading group and I divided the readings for the week. I suggested we use a 3-2-1 reading strategy to capture the most important information. We added a section for “key words and phrase” and it was done.

Another member of my group e-mailed a draft Word document of what we’d decided on. I took the doc, fed it to Google Docs and shared it to the rest of the group.

Over 72 hours, the notes came rolling in – synchronously, across all of our computer screens, with no files or iterations of files to keep track of.

Where I had questions or comments, I got to add them in and my group members added their as well.

This morning, I created a Google Collection for all the files for the course. I created a file for next week’s readings and dropped my assignments so far in there as well. Collaboration, right?

This morning, I paid for my coffee and bagel with my phone – and I wasn’t at Starbucks.

Paying attention to my surroundings, I saw a decal on the window of my local coffee shop advertising LevelUp. A download later and I was outfitted with my own QR Code for paying at local businesses. Not unlike other apps designed to get patrons to visit businesses, LevelUp has a built-in savings plan and daily deals. The piece that sold me, no receipt. It gets emailed to me and sent to my phone. Later today, I’ll be setting up an inbox filter that channels my receipts out of my inbox and into a designated folder.

Speaking of designations, I got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for month – mint.com.

Now, more than any other time in my life, tracking my spending and keeping a budget are key constructs. In undergrad, my job at the paper supplemented my income and insured me a paycheck would be on the other end of each fortnight.

Though I’ve some contract work and a newly added research assistantship, I need some help making sure my finances are under tight control.

Shifting from a productive member of society to a straight-up consumer of goods, services and knowledge calls for a shift in thinking as well.

Mint is there to help. In about 10 minutes, I’d created a profile linked to my bank and credit card accounts as well as my student loans. Replete with budgets, savings analyses and comparisons of financial services, Mint is a financial advisor for those of us who can’t afford financial advisors. If I were a parent sending my kid to college, mint would be a requirement before I let the kid out the door.

Part of the joy of being a student that’s satisfying the curious portion of my brain has been developing new work and living flows. I’ve been working to leverage what’s free and available to me so the things I stress about are the things I care about.