“The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit from the experience of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. Each must learn its lesson anew.”

— Albert Einstein, October 26, 1929

In This Edition

›A Special Honor: Teaching With NGPF

›Truth Teller Articles Worth Your Time

›This Week’s Podcast: Get Out While You Can or Stay the Course

›Testimonials

From Paul

A Special Honor: Teaching With NGPF

Next Generation Personal Finance (NGPF.org) has more than 150,000 teachers who are using their free curriculum to teach junior high and high school students. I have worked with NGPF for many years, but this year is special. I have been invited to make four 60-minute presentations on The Math and History of Investing, The #1 Reason to Use Index Funds, The Inside Story on Diversification and The $5 Million Payoff for a Financially Literate High School Graduate. There will also be an Office Hours Q&A Session in the fifth week. All of these presentations will be recorded live and archived for access to teachers and the public.

It is a real honor to work with NGPF. As the following article points out, this organization has made important headway in making the curriculum more impactful on students.

The Research Is In: NGPF Curriculum Helped Students Improve on Every Measure Tested

Teachers already know NGPF curriculum works. Now there’s a peer-reviewed study that says so. Research published last month in the Journal of Economic Education is the first academic study of NGPF’s curriculum, and the findings are strong.

Researchers at Penn State Behrend reviewed data from students in classrooms where NGPF was used as the core curriculum through the 2022–23 school year. They assessed students before the course and again after, then compared the two.

The verdict: students improved on every measure the researchers tested.

Statistically Significant Gains Across the Board

Measure	Pre	Post	Relative gain
Standards-aligned assessment	47.5	68.1	+43%
Subjective knowledge	66.0	81.6	+24%
Objective knowledge (independent)	55.2	70.6	+28%
Financial self-esteem	80.9	96.5	+19%
Self-reported behavior	65.3	69.2	+6%

Questions in the objective-knowledge row came from outside researchers with no connection to NGPF materials — included specifically to guard against pro-NGPF bias in the results.

Other notable gains

• An 8% gain in how strongly students agreed with the statement, “I have conversations with my parents regarding personal finance.”

• By the end of the course, students were choosing “I don’t know” far less often.

The course cut a persistent gender gap in half

Female students started 10.4 points behind their male peers on objective knowledge and finished 5.0 points behind. The confidence gap closed almost entirely: girls started nearly 9 points behind boys on financial self-esteem and ended within 1.3 points. Their self-esteem gains were about 64% larger than their male peers’. The pattern held in regression models controlling for grade level, GPA, favorite subject and learning style.

Every student group improved

The researchers found statistically significant improvements across all ethnic groups, with no significant differences between them. Black students and white students both made substantial gains on all five measures.

In-person delivery outperformed online and hybrid

In-person curriculum delivery outperformed online/hybrid delivery by roughly 6 points on pre- to post-assessment gains. The advantage was strongest on knowledge measures and persisted in the researchers’ regression analysis — supporting NGPF’s core belief that a trained teacher in the classroom, not a screen, is the model for effective financial education at scale.

Read the full study: Filbeck, G., Pettner, J., & Zhao, X. (2026). The effectiveness of Next Gen Personal Finance’s financial literacy program. Journal of Economic Education. Free to read and share under a Creative Commons license. Read it here.

Truth Teller Articles

Worth Your Time This Week

A few recent pieces from our Truth Tellers that I think are well worth reading.

Bonds Are as Attractive as They Have Been in 20 Years: What Should You Do About It?

Jim Dahle

Retirement Planning in Real Life

The essential planning priorities for every stage of your retirement countdown.

Christine Benz

When Safe Withdrawal Rates Collide With RMDs

Christine Benz

How to Invest When Your Portfolio Gets Bigger

Ben Carlson

The New Normal of Stock Market Concentration

Ben Carlson

It’s a Concentrated World

Ben Carlson

This Week’s Podcast

Get Out While You Can or Stay the Course

Paul opens with news of a new opportunity to reach young investors: a five-part series for Next Generation Personal Finance (NGPF.org), available to some 150,000 teachers who use NGPF’s free curriculum. Topics include the math and history of investing, the case for index funds, the inside story on diversification, the $5 million payoff for a financially literate high school graduate, and a teacher Q&A session. Each presentation will be shared with Sound Investing listeners the following week.

Then Paul turns to two listener questions that go to the heart of how people actually experience the market.

The first asks whether broad diversification really produces the best returns, or whether a more focused portfolio would do better. He walks through the Bessembinder research showing that roughly 4% of companies drove most of the market’s long-term return, Fama and French data on small-cap value going back almost 100 years, and Vanguard’s own real-time returns since 1998 comparing $10,000 invested in the S&P 500, mid-cap, small-cap blend and small-cap value asset classes.

The second is a letter from an investor who put his first real savings, earned at $7 an hour, into Fidelity Magellan in 1985, lost 30% on Black Monday in October 1987, and pulled everything out. Forty years later he still fears the next crash and asks whether Paul’s Ultimate Buy and Hold portfolio could leave him waking up with half his money gone.

Paul closes with a story about five 24-year-old engineers he met on Bainbridge Island, and an offer to anyone who can gather a group that would benefit from a conversation about investing.

Links

Fine-Tuning Your Asset Allocation tables
NGPF: ngpf.org

▶ Listen Now

Testimonials

“Paul is an absolute gem. Have been following his work for decades. What a benevolent gentleman to be teaching the masses for free. Loved Jack Bogle and love Paul M.”

— From a listener

Thanks for listening, for sharing this information with others, and for your generous donations. And please keep getting the free We’re Talking Millions link into the hands of people who might be helped.

All the best to you and your family,
Paul Merriman

From Paul Merriman

Resources & Ways to Connect

Free Book Download

Get Paul's latest book — completely free. Thousands of investors have used it to build a better financial future.

📚 Download Free Book

Latest Podcast

Sound Investing — practical, no-nonsense financial wisdom you can act on today.

🎙️ Listen Now

YouTube Channel

Hundreds of videos on investing, retirement planning, and building long-term wealth.

▶️ Watch on YouTube

Follow on TikTok

Short, powerful investing tips delivered daily. Share with the next generation of investors.

🎵 Follow on TikTok

Support the Foundation

Your donation helps us continue providing free financial education to investors everywhere. Every dollar makes a difference.

❤️ Make a Donation

The $5 Million Payoff of a Financially Literate Teenager