Life of Fred: Language Arts and Financial Choices

I mentioned back in January that a friend tipped me off to the fact that Life of Fred, our favorite purveyor of home school math curriculum, had recently released a language arts series. Since I wasn’t spending money that month, I had to wait until February to order it!

I didn’t know what to do after First Language Lessons Level 4 was over. (I really love FLL.) My plan was to use Hake/Saxon grammar next, but once I began reviewing Hake/Saxon, I really disliked it. So, I was especially happy to see this new set of books since we’re such big Life of Fred fans.

Here are my initial thoughts on Life of Fred: Language Arts series. 

Ilana, my 11 year old, loves the books. She whizzed through the first one, entitled Australia, in a couple of weeks, and I had to order the next book, called Begin Teaching, which arrived today.

Julien, 13, on the other hand, did a few lessons in the first book and declared, “Mom, it’s WAY too easy.” Hmm. I told him to stick with it, that it would likely start off deceptively easy and get progressively harder, but no. He said the whole thing was beneath him. So we’ll see how he does with this next book. If that’s too easy then I’ll order the next one.

While I was poking around at Z-Twist books, however, I made another neat discovery: a book about personal finance and entrepreneurship.

I love that topic, and I’m bound and determined to teach my kids good money habits.

So many of us didn’t learn about money stuff when we were in school. My mom taught me how to balance a checkbook when I opened my first checking account as a kid, and my parents were good models of self-employment and what’s more important than money.

But I do so wish I had started out as a young married person understanding about investing, avoiding debt like the plague, and other tenets of good stewardship.

A couple of my kids have read Dave Ramsey’s books, but Life of Fred is way more fun.

This newest book is called Life of Fred: Financial Choices and I read it today. It’s wonderful.

See my penciled-in notes at the bottom right side of the page? 

I found myself making notes in the margins and adding little stars in places I really wanted to make sure my kids paid attention. A few of the topics (in my words, these are not actual chapter headings):

• The 5 ways to invest money
• The evils of debt
• How to calculate your income, assets, liabilities, and how to budget
• The importance of living under your means
• The importance of goal setting
• Personal habits that will help you be successful (including how to behave when you have a job)
• How to calculate interest – how to figure out how much you’ll actually pay for that charged item
• How to make compound interest your friend and retire young
• The basics of real estate investing
• How to start a business
• Trading short-term pleasure for long-term pain, and vice versa
• How not to be a typical American
• Insurance – which is smart, which is not
• The “sunk cost” fallacy – oh how I wish I had understood this as a young person!

All of this in an appealing, fun to read package. This book would be great for a middle school child on up to adult. I plan on having all the kids study it eventually, but Ilana, Julien and Caleb will definitely be reading it this summer!  I am a bit of a personal finance geek and I learned plenty.

Most Life of Fred books are available on Amazon, and some will have free shipping if you have a Prime membership. I usually order my books from ZTwist Books (the preferred distributor of LoF books), however, because the price is comparable and they offer free media mail shipping.