Notes
FinBizify Notes:
teaching teens business and money education
Short pieces on how schools teach about business and money, what the evidence says about current progress, and what FinBizify is building as a response.
A money education app for teenagers is now open to the public. Three problems it was built to fix.
FinBizify, a money education app for teenagers, opened to the public on October 8, 2026. Here are the three problems it was built to fix and what comes next.
Americans rate schools at a record low. They rate critical thinking lowest of all.
Gallup's 2026 poll puts satisfaction with K-12 schools at a 27-year low, with critical thinking rated lowest. What changed since 2019, and what parents can actually do about it.
Stock trades have cost $0 since 2019. Here's who pays for them.
U.S. online stock trades have cost $0 since October 2019. How Schwab, then Robinhood, pushed commissions to zero, and who pays for a free trade now.
The U.S. Treasury stopped mailing paper checks in 2025. Teen money behavior had already moved past them.
The Treasury stopped mailing paper checks in 2025 as check use fell to 7% of bill payments. Teens had already moved to cards, P2P apps, and BNPL.
The tech elite's alternative to college got the headlines. Cornell's diagnosis, released the same day, matters more.
The same day the tech elite announced a $35 million alternative to college, a Cornell faculty committee declared higher education in crisis and named judgment as school's real product. Why the quieter report matters more.
Many young adults get their investing information from social media. The algorithm decides whether it's any good.
60% of retail investors aged 18-34 use social media for investment decisions. The feed ranks by engagement, and little in it reports who has been right before.
The national average savings rate mostly measures who isn't shopping for a better one.
The FDIC's national average savings rate is deposit-weighted, so a bank's "X times the national average" pitch mostly measures how little most savers earn.
When school doesn't teach it, family wealth does.
In the U.S., financial literacy tracks family income, and so does access to the class meant to close the gap. Pew and NGPF data on who gets left behind.
The Education Department set one test for edtech: does it improve learning? A family can apply it today.
The U.S. Department of Education's new edtech guidance says school software should be judged by whether it improves learning rather than by screen time or logins, and it hands the same test to families.
A new exam can standardize content but can't staff the classroom.
WSJ readers picked apart a new AP exam's sample quiz by the hundreds, but federal data shows the deeper problem: business and career-technical education classrooms nationwide are short on teachers.
A 14-year-old can trade stocks alone now. Learning how to do it well is optional.
Schwab and Fidelity now let teens trade stocks independently. What the industry is willing to pay to teach, and what it still leaves optional.
Personal finance is required in majority of states. Investing often isn't taught.
Only 13% of teens invest and 47% of personal-finance courses cover it. What the evidence says about why, and what actually fixes it.
Two lotteries decide what a teenager learns about money
A teenager's financial education is decided twice by chance: once by which school they attend, once by an algorithm. What the evidence says about both halves.
39 states require it now. Few can tell you if it's working.
39 states now require personal finance to graduate, up from 21 in 2020. What the evidence says about whether that seat time is actually changing behavior.