I attended yesterday's public meeting of the Financial Literacy and Education Commission (FLEC), which announced a significant and sensible change to the national strategy for financial literacy  that has been in effect since 2006. This new strategy includes a review of existing federal financial literacy programs, not merely to catalog them, but to identify the ones that work.

Halleluiah!

The new strategy is a step in the right direction, yet time's a-wasting! This is particularly the case for young adults about to graduate with all that student loan debt!

Tim Ranzetta of Student Lending Analytics  lays out components of the successful financial literacy strategy implemented in New Zealand and a critique of the FLEC's process and progress, or lack thereof, so far.  New Zealand's strategy is proof that dramatic and measurable progress can be made in a few years. Diana Crossan, New Zealand Retirement Commissioner, and presenter at the FLEC meeting, insists their success is due in large part to broad embrace of public, private, for-profit, and non-profit participants.

This is such a critical issue; and the problem is so enormous. If we are truly looking for things that work, why wouldn’t we open up our search beyond the federal domain? There's plenty of room for many approaches, targeting different demographics, targeting different financial topics and skills, targeting different life-stages, etc.  I think we’d all agree that sinking more time, money and energy into programs that don't work, no matter how good they make us feel, is something we can ill afford.

Let’s identify all of the programs that work, government, for profit and non profit, and employ them to solve this urgent problem now!