We are free to be truly accessible. We believe financial literacy is a basic human right. But we also know it is a pursued interest and that our money personality is largely established by adolescence. So we built a tool to give school-aged children some real-life practice, asking and answering questions about typical childhood purchases, before they spend their money or anyone else's. We chose this approach because thinking before buying naturally reveals that asking questions about money is something anyone can do, to avoid disappointment, reduce waste, improve family harmony and protect the planet.

Once you discover that you can get and use (at first basic) financial information to make your life better, why…would you ever stop? You’d stop if the only way to continue practicing was to cross a paywall. So, we don’t have one. Humans need to try something out at least three times before they can appreciate all its benefits. We want young people to be able to use the DIMS SCORE® Calculator on demand, particularly immediately following workshops. Having to register and pay will prevent most 10-15 year old’s from continuing to test-drive what we want to become a new & exciting life skill.

We’re very efficient. Our digital platform allows us to very efficiently deliver wise-spending lessons to children from all economic realities in various settings (at school, in community groups, or at home). Our scale model is “teach-the-teacher,” so our content can get in front of students we cannot. (And our content has universal appeal. Find a child who doesn’t believe they deserve at least one holiday or birthday gift a year! Who is never tasked with answering the question “What would you like?”).

We don’t have to update or distribute textbooks. We’re able to incorporate valuable user feedback almost as soon as we receive it. The DIMS SCORE® report (a shareable summary of all the math and thinking behind a possible purchase) is also digitally generated.

All of that said, please don’t conflate the fact that we are free with the idea that we don’t need help to give as many middle school students as possible the opportunity to learn about money in a way they find immediately helpful because we do! Let us know if your organization is values-aligned and you’d like to collaborate (e.g., by listing us as a trusted resource or running workshops as part of broader youth programming). In the interim, spread the news: Thinking before buying is an incredibly powerful yet easy-to-learn and sticky life skill. We exist solely to help teach it to middle school students everywhere.

We help children develop smart spending habits because financial information needs to be relevant to be helpful, and spending is the first financial decision most young people face.

Early financial education builds essential confidence in basic finance, paving the way for understanding more complex topics later in life. But it has to be engaging (read immediately helpful) to get the job done. Lessons on distant concepts like mortgages don't help a 10-15-year-old see the value in financial literacy.

The DIMS SCORE® Calculator allows kids to address a relatable question (“Should I buy or ask for this?”) and see the impact of a small amount of consistent thinking on the answer. Experiencing this during formative years is key, as early money habits are highly stable and shape lifelong financial behaviors.

1. The thousands of parents and educators who have already given their kids what has to be one of the best gifts ever: the habit of thinking before buying!
2. Robin Taub, Author of “The Wisest Investment: Teaching Your Kids to Be Responsible, Independent, and Money-Smart For Life”
3. The Money Awareness & Inclusion Awards
4. Next Gen Personal Finance – the leading financial literacy NGO in the United States.
5. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (Canadian Financial Literacy Database)
6. FoolProofMe.org Walter Cronkite’s “healthy skepticism” foundation.
7. Seedlyng Financial Education
8. The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE.org)
9. We’ve also answered U Chicago’s “Questions to Pose”. These were designed to help parents and community members understand if a financial education program in their school is unbiased and high-quality.

Kids are interested in money. So let’s employ their natural curiosity to convince them that money-smarts are worth pursuing! Young people soak up normalization of the fact that money is scarce for many families, and finite for all. Thinking before buying is an engaging and age-appropriate way to get that job done.

Early financial education solves so much. When kids acquire comfort with basic personal finance terms and ideas (e.g. cost-per-use, or the full cost of an experience, versus just the “ticket” price) they’re also developing the confidence required to seek out the more sophisticated financial information they’ll need later in life when it’s relevant, and can be helpful.

We don’t begin any other subject “in the middle”, so why wait until high school or beyond to teach personal finance? Mastery of any subject begins – at the beginning. Spending a little bit of allowance, birthday, holiday gift, grocery or lunch money is the first time most kids get to make a “financial decision”. So compare thinking before buying to the A-B-C’s or 1-2-3’s of personal finance, the necessary foundation. When done right (i.e. via a relevant experience), early financial education primes the demand pump for later-in-life learning, like full-semester personal finance courses in high school and college. Those courses are the next necessary step to fully prepare today’s youth for the earning, spending, saving, sharing and investing decisions that lie in their futures. But you need to believe a course of study will help you, to partake, and then get the most out of it.

Purpose led learning works best. As Ted Dintersmith says in his book What School Could Be, “When students work on problems that are important to them…with real-world impact that can be publicly displayed…they gain conviction that they can make a difference in their world.” This is what families tell us occurs when their children use the DIMS SCORE® Calculator to quickly, but not arbitrarily, consider a possible purchase:they research answers to simple questions, they generate a summary of all the math & thinking they’ve done, and then they can decide whether or not they want to move forward with the purchase, sometimes involving their parents in the ultimate decision.

Kids are fully capable of making terrific consumer decisions, when we give them a tool that lets them quickly, but thoughtfully, do so. They are relieved to experience first-hand that thinking before buying does NOT mean that you never get to do or buy anything fun. They quickly embrace planning their spending, when it takes minutes, but spares them hours, weeks, and sometimes even years of disappointment and waste.

Kids are very aware of their family’s money situation and rarely use the DIMS SCORE® Calculator to justify purchases that don’t make sense for their family. Once all the facts of a purchase are laid bare, kids stop themselves from asking for…Super Bowl Tickets, or $1200 phones when a $400 phone gets the job done. The shareable summary of all the math & thinking they have done (the DIMS SCORE® report), does, however, give them a tool that can be used to crowd-fund the purchase of one larger, more meaningful gift, amongst extended family members.

There’s no financial literacy gender gap among 10-14-year-olds. Boys and girls ask the same sorts of questions in our workshops. They have the same misunderstandings about money. E.g. many of them confuse digital payment methods (credit cards, debit cards, ApplePay, Venmo or Interac) with how they are funded (someone working at a job to earn wages). This tells us that if we do nothing other than raise the FIRST generation of young adults, where young women continue to ask questions about money before making personal financial decisions, with the same frequency as young men (because historically, they have not), we can significantly narrow the money gender gap.

Too many of today’s adults lament they were never taught about money. We can’t tell you how many parents and educators have said “I wish this had been available when I was a kid!”. Re-engineering previously unsuccessful approaches to earning, spending, sharing, saving, and investing, is painful and challenging.  Let’s eliminate avoidable financial stress (e.g. stress caused by impulse spending), and reduce other sources to the extent possible, by building a world where financial literacy is seen in the same light as reading and writing: a fundamental human right.