Here’s What Happens When We Fix That.

Picture a room full of adults who care deeply about investing. Now ask them how many actually learned about investing in high school. We did exactly that at a recent event, and out of a full room, three hands went up. Three.

For everyone else, the answers came in a rush. Trial and error. Family stories. The running theme: unless you happened to have someone in your life to teach you, investing just never came up. You graduated, entered the workforce, and realized you were supposed to already know how money worked. There was enough shame wrapped around that gap that most people never admitted it, let alone asked for help.

“That shame is not a personal failing. It is a design flaw. And the Fool Community Foundation is in the business of fixing it.”

FCF launched as the philanthropic arm of The Motley Fool. While The Motley Fool helps people already on a path to financial health invest smarter, FCF focuses on the folks living paycheck to paycheck, helping them take that next real step toward financial freedom.

To reach students at real scale, we needed more than just a good idea. We needed a partner. That is why we teamed up with NextGen Personal Finance, the gold standard in the classroom. NextGen is our primary distribution channel, and their reach is staggering:

The Teacher’s Dilemma

Tim Ranzetta, NextGen’s co-founder, laid out the problem. When students test before and after these courses, investing is the subject they know least—and it shows the smallest growth. It is not because students do not want to learn. It is because teachers are afraid to teach it. Most of them never learned it either.

A teacher who is maybe contributing to a 403(b) without fully understanding the mechanics does not feel equipped to stand in front of a room and explain index funds. So they skip the unit or hand out a textbook. The material gets covered, but nothing lands.

The Freedometer was built to make that problem go away.

Clarity Burke, who helped develop the tool, knows what it looks like when education fails. She spent years teaching in underserved communities, and she heard the same question over and over: why did not anyone teach us this sooner?

The Freedometer is the tool she wished she had. It is modular and gamified, designed so a teacher with zero investing background can be ready in hours. Whether the students come from wealthy households or are living in survival mode, it works.

The Acceleration Zone

The module that changes everything is the one on compound growth. A student types in a monthly dollar amount—even $20—and picks a timeline.

The Freedometer shows an inflection point called the acceleration zone. It kicks in around year eight. That is the moment your investments start earning more in a single year than you are actively putting in. Your money becomes the engine, not your labor.

“The idea that investing was for someone else, from some other kind of family, just dissolved. What replaced it was something that looked a lot like a plan.”

The Freedometer is live right now at freedometer.org. If you are a teacher, it is free. If you know a teacher, send them the link.

Paul, Bob’s dad, and the one other person in that room already got what most of us did not. The Freedometer exists so that someday, when we ask that question, the whole room raises its hand.