The Financial Four
Each year, Americans spend hours filling out more than 70 million brackets for the NCAA March Madness tournament. Many will carefully review the stats for each of the NCAA teams in the hopes of predicting the perfect brackets, while others will choose teams using unorthodox strategies; for example, choosing teams based on which mascot can defeat the other or simply flipping a coin.
Despite the strategy you may have chosen to prioritize your bracket, chances are your bracket has at least a few flaws. But what if you could spend time filling out a bracket where you couldn’t lose? The National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) and the Financial Planning Association® (FPA®) have partnered to share an interactive ‘Financial Four’ bracket to help participants prioritize the financial areas of their life that are most important to them.
So how does it work? The Financial Four bracket closely follows the format of a typical March Madness bracket. Instead of selecting from 32 teams, you select from 32 financial concepts including Preparing a Financial Emergency Kit, Using Credit Responsibly, Reining In Debt, and Calculating Retirement Needs. All of the 32 concepts are organized into four categories – Growing Your Money, Learning and Talking About Money, Protecting What You Have, and Spending Wisely – just as the NCAA bracket organizes the 32 teams into four regions of the US. Each category contains four “match-ups” of financial concepts and participants are asked to select the concept that is most important to them. You continue to prioritize all 32 concepts and until you arrive at your ‘financial four’, and then finally identify your number one financial priority.
Once the bracket is completed, participants have the option to “submit” their bracket to see how others prioritized their bracket and to learn what financial experts suggest as their ‘financial four’ priorities. Click here or click the Financial Four bracket below to prioritize your financial four. And, if you take the time to fill out your Financial Four bracket, we would love to see how it turns out! Please feel free to send us a print out or screen shot of the page or simply email us a list of your Financial Four.
