Three 90-Minute Presentations Every School District Should Give To Their Employees (and here are the resources to do it)

I’ve (actually, we’ve) been offering my Personal Financial Literacy for Colorado Educators course for four years now. I decided to offer this initially because, based on my interactions with fellow Colorado educators, there seemed to be a large percentage of them who didn’t know some key aspects of financial literacy (and, specifically, how their defined benefit pension could impact all of their other financial decisions). The response was positive (to say the least). We had such long wait lists that I recruited two other folks to also teach sections (when they had time) to try to address the backlog. We are now teaching our 27th section and over 600 Colorado educators have taken the class. I’ve also done some smaller presentations for small groups in various districts (typically organized through the local union), so that’s reached a couple of hundred more

Which is great. But there are over 55,000 public school teachers in Colorado, and likely another 20,000 or so administrators and classified employees. So while I’m happy we’ve helped maybe 800 or so, that means there are still around 75,000 we haven’t reached yet. This month I’m presenting (via Zoom) three sessions to interested Littleton Public School employees (the district I retired from), and while I make no claim that these are the best presentations ever, it struck me that these three sessions are a fairly quick and easy way to reach those 75,000 (if someone in each district would customize them slightly for their district). And if we move outside of Colorado, there are over 7 million public school employees in the United States. It turns out that these presentations would work very well for them as well (again, customized for each district and for the pension plan in that state). Since I have a bit of knowledge of each state’s pension plan, I feel confident that the presentations could easily be modified for each pension plan (and the benefits portion for each school district).

Note: I think the class is likely more helpful than the presentations (because of the discussions and interactions among participants), but it obviously takes much more time for both the participants and the facilitator. So while I’ve suggested that others also teach the class, I think the idea of these three presentations is much more actionable for many folks.

Some general notes on the presentations:

• Each presentation can be given over Zoom (or similar) or, of course, in person.
  
• They each need around 90 minutes, although you certainly could provide even more time for questions/discussion at the end.
  
• The first presentation (on employer benefits) would obviously need to be customized for each employer, but that’s easy enough to do based on the benefits and the employer-based retirement plans they offer.
  
• The second presentation (on their pension) works for all Colorado school districts, but would obviously need to be customized for the pension plan applicable to districts outside of Colorado.
  
• The third presentation (on investments) works pretty well for everyone, but would need some customization based on the applicable pension plan as well as the employer-based retirement plans available from that employer.
  
• For anyone interested in doing this, I’m happy to serve as a resource to help you customize. (I’m even happy to give the presentation, but if more than a few folks take me up on this offer I won’t have the bandwidth to do all of them :-).

So here are the slides for each presentation (note that there are multiple links within each slide deck). You can choose File–>Make a Copy to get your own editable version.

Session 1: [Their School District] Benefits

1. Medical FSA, Limited Purpose FSA, Dependent Care FSA
2. Health Savings Account (HSA)
3. PPO/DHMO vs HDHP
4. HSA as Stealth Retirement Account
5. Salary Schedule
6. 401k, 403b, 457b (briefly, more in session three)

Session 2: [Their] Pension

1. [Their] Pension (Reading and interpreting your Highest Average Salary (HAS) Table, optimizing HAS, pension formula, options 1, 2 and 3)
2. Purchasing Service Credit (pros and cons)
3. Optimizing [their pension] (including salary schedule, Section 125, additional income in HAS years + 1)
4. Possible Additional Topics if time: Health Insurance in Retirement, Transition year, Social Security

Session 3: Investing

1. Investing Vocabulary
2. Asset Allocation (including optimizing in light of your PERA defined benefit)
3. Asset Tax Status (IRA, 401k, 403b, 457b, HSA, Taxable Brokerage Account)
4. What to invest in (funds/etfs, fees, vendors)
   • Employer Based: 401k, 403b, 457b, HSA
   • Individual: Vanguard or Fidelity
5. Invest half your raises

Again, these would need to be customized for the employer/pension, and of course there may be other things that you want to modify. I think that if every school district offered something like this (whether offered by the district, offered by the union, or simply offered by someone interested in offering it) it could have life-changing positive impacts on hundreds/thousands/millions of educators. And, not for nothing, that would end up having large positive impacts on our students, as educators who are less stressed about finances will be even more successful in the classroom than they are now.

And if you want to get even crazier, you could hold a book study around the book for their pension system, the book applicable to everyone (not just educators with a pension), or a “podcast study” around this limited podcast series. But, again, that’s much more time intensive than the three presentations.