NewsLetter – September 2019

NOT SO GOOD NEWS

Financial Literacy Skills Have Taken a Nose Dive Since the Great Recession

“Younger people had the sharpest drop in their ability to answer four of five financial literacy questions correctly…

It’s been a decade since the Great Recession’s upheaval, and while some measures of Americans’ economic well-being have recovered like the unemployment rate, their financial literacy isn’t one of them.

Between 2009 and 2018, there was an 8% slip in the amount of people who could correctly answer most questions about interest rates, inflation, bond prices, financial risk and mortgage rates — from 42% to 34%.

That “clear trend of declining financial literacy” is one of the worrying signals in a three-year study from the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, the educational arm of the nonprofit organization regulating the brokerage industry.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-financial-literacy-skills-have-plummeted-since-the-great-recession-2019-06-26

ARE YOU GOD’S WIFE? A FEW ITEMS TO MAKE YOU SMILE

From Lee

Teacher Debbie Moon’s first graders were discussing a picture of a family One little boy in the picture had a different hair color than the other members. One of her students suggested that he was adopted.

A little girl said, “I know all about adoption — I was adopted …”

“What does it mean to be adopted?” asked another child.

“It means,” said the girl, “that you grew in your mommy’s heart instead of her “tummy !”

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On my way home one day, I stopped to watch a Little League baseball game that was being played in a park near my home. As I sat down behind the bench on the first-base line, I asked one of the boys what the score was.

“We’re behind 14 to nothing,” he answered with a smile.

“Really?” I said. “I have to say, you don’t look very discouraged.”

“Discouraged?” the boy asked with a puzzled look on his face.

“Why should we be discouraged? We haven’t been up to bat yet.”

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An eye witness account from New York City, on a cold day in December some years ago: A little boy, about 10 years old, was standing before a shoe store on the roadway, barefooted, peering through the window, and shivering with cold.

A lady approached the young boy and said, “My, but you’re in such deep thought staring in that window!”

“I was asking God to give me a pair of shoes,” was the boy’s reply.

The lady took him by the hand, went into the store, and asked the clerk to get half a dozen pairs of socks for the boy. She then asked if he could give her a basin of water and a towel. He quickly brought them to her.

She took the little fellow to the back part of the store and, removing her gloves, knelt down, washed his little feet, and dried them with the towel.

By this time, the clerk had returned with the socks. Placing a pair upon the boy’s feet, she purchased him a pair of shoes.

She tied up the remaining pairs of socks and gave them to him. She patted him on the head and said, “No doubt, you will be more comfortable now.”

As she turned to go, the astonished kid caught her by the hand and, looking up into her face with tears in his eyes, asked her:

“Are you God’s wife?”