Universal Survival Law 6: Don't Let Anyone Mess With Your Money

Objective: To inform participants about the costs of not committing to their
education, the dangers of fast money, and to educate young people on the costs of
living.

Universal Survival Law: Don’t Let Anyone Mess With Your Money.

Time: 120 minutes. You may want to break this lesson up into 2 parts.

Materials: Flip chart, markers, fact sheets.

How It Works:

Part 1

Help your students, as a group, to brainstorm and calculate the costs of living on their own. This exercise requires calculating the cost of living for one year and multiplying that cost by the estimated remaining years of life. Use 80 as the average life expectancy. Ask students to be as inclusive as possible and encourage them to include everything from groceries, children, mortgage payments, a car, and any luxury items that they envision themselves having in the future. Ask students to be as realistic as possible while still outlining a comfortable future for themselves. Write out each item and an average cost on your flip chart. Your students may have no idea what the cost of living is for a middle class adult with a family. They will need your help and guidance in fixing appropriate prices.

After students complete their list, help your students determine the average wage per year to afford all of the listed items. This can be done fairly easily by totaling the cost of all the items, dividing by life expectancy, and then dividing that number by 52 weeks to determine how much a student would have to earn a week. You can divide that number by 40 hours to get an average wage per hour necessary to afford all of the listed items.

Part 2

Choose a participant and ask them to give you all of the money they have in their pocket. If the young person doesn=t have any money, find someone who does. Most likely, the youth will refuse. If so, you should continue to demand their money without explaining why you want it. Be dramatic. Finally, ask the young person, in a non-threatening manner, whether they would have fought you if you had been on the street and demanded their money. Inform the young person and the group that while they may be willing to fight you for a marginal sum of money, they have in fact freely and willingly given away hundreds of dollars a day because they have a disease, the Afast money disease.@

Ask young people what they think you mean by the fast money disease.
Challenge youth with the following facts:

If you drop out of school, your expected life time earnings will be $616,000.

If you take your education a bit more seriously and graduate high school or can earn your GED with some community college credit, your lifetime earnings will be 1,036,000.

By failing to complete high school or get your GED, you lose 420,000 over a lifetime, and for every day you missed school, you lost about $720.

Inform participants that if they really take their education seriously and complete a college degree, their expected life time earnings will be 1,900,000. So, in reality, by failing to complete high school, participants cost themselves 1,284,000 over their life.

Challenge the group: AIf I told you I had a bag of $420,000 waiting for you after you completed high school, would you have worked hard to graduate?
ALet=s break it down per year. If I said, if you complete your senior year, I can guarantee you $105,000, would you have gone to class? What if I said you had to shave your head? Would you still work for that $105,000?@

Challenge youth, in the context of their answers, to explain how it makes sense for them to fight over the money in their pocket but not to commit to school. Again, ask them about fast money and what it means to them in their life.

*Note: There will be one young person who will reference drugs or other illegal activity as a means of economic achievement and a way to earn a lot of money without going through the whole schooling process. Do us a favor, tell him or her to get real (this could even be made into a separate lesson)! If they knew anything about the drug game, they would know three things, which have been proven by university research with thousands of inner city drug dealers:

Most drug dealers make less than 300 week, and have a second or third job to support themselves.
Drug dealers work long hours under dangerous conditions. Inform youth that police are now patrolling the streets more heavily, three strikes and you get a minimum of 25 years, and that many juveniles are being treated like adults.
Most drug dealers are on the streets less than 18 months.

Now, if they still want to maintain that they can achieve long term economic achievement doing what is illegal and basically doesn=t work, ask them to show you a successful drug dealer who has sent all of their children through college and is now retired and enjoying life. Some young people may point to people they know who are successful or drug lords in Columbia- tell them that they are falling for one of the worst tricks in the book- that the exception proves the rule and that their personal experience tells the whole story. If they really want to know the truth, ask young people if they want to take a trip to a local jail and talk with drug felons about their experience and the experience of other drug dealers on the street. In any event, be strong and tough with your participants. Quite simply, we can no longer legitimize drug dealing as a rational response to the lack of employment opportunities for young adults.

Part 3

Return to the cost of living exercise written on the flip chart. Based on the average lifetime earnings of the different education achievers (drop out, high school graduate, college graduate), explore with young people what items will the group have to give up? Make the group go through the tough decision making process of what to cross off, and be dramatic when you take items off the list. See what will be left. Have students compare the three lists and three different life styles.

Upon completion of the exercise ask the group:
What did you learn?
What can you do to ensure that you will have the comforts of life?
Do you still think fast money is the best kind of money?

^^top

Making It Movement | The Book | Learn the M.I. Message | MI Activities For Youth
Instructors Guide

NEW

YDRF Announces The “MAKiN’ iT” Youth Development Workshop Series
Bring this important message to your program or school.
Click here to find out more.