Blog Posts About: financialbasics

Videos in our "Money" category have been a focus for us this year and we're excited to announce a new pack of six video called the "Financial Basics Pack."  Packs are groups of Common Craft videos that can be purchased together for a 15% discount. 

The Financial Basics Pack includes videos on the topics below. You can watch them all on this page.

This video pack is for educators and influencers who need better ways to teach financial responsibility.  The videos can be licensed for use in classrooms, in learning management systems (LMS), on public-facing websites, etc. If you see an opportunity to use these videos for your school, business or website, learn more about licensing here, or contact us

Other packs include:

• Social Media Pack (9 videos)
• Computer Basics Pack (5 videos)

Today we've published a new video: Stock Markets in Plain English

This video is one of our most requested and focuses on a few basic ideas:

• Why companies offer their stock to the public
• Why people buy and sell stocks
• What makes stock prices change
• How we measure stock markets using indices

This video is part of our Money series and one of the first to touch on markets.  It was also one of the toughest to make. Economic forces like supply and demand can quickly turn into rabbit holes. Keeping it short and sweet was a challenge. We're so excited to share it with the world.

We expect this video to be useful to teachers, but also organizations related to investing, particularly ones focused on educating those new to the market.

Today we've published a new video: Insurance in Plain English

As we wrote recently, we're focusing on our Money category over the next month or two.  This video, Insurance in Plain English, is meant to explain why insurance exists, what service it provides, how it works and what role it plays in being financially responsible.

Insurance is a concept that surrounds us all the time. In fact, it's so common that it's easy to assume that everyone understands it and why it makes sense. Unfortunately, there are not a lot resources for teaching the big ideas behind insurance, much less ones that do it in an entertaining way. This video is meant to make the boring subject of insurance a bit more fun and interesting.

We hope this video will provide educators a resource for helping people young and old make smarter and more informed decision about their coverage.

Here's a question for you: Were you taught about financial responsibility when you were young? 

When I ask this question, the vast majority of people respond with a quick "nope." I sure wasn't. In my high school I learned to recite a poem from BeoWulf in Olde English, but never learned about 401ks or compound interest. In light of the current financial crisis, we want to do our part to make sure people understand the important elements of personal finance and being financially responsible.

The First Three

This is why we've focused the first part of this year on videos about financial basics.  We started with very basic videos, meant to be prerequisites for more complex topics.  We've covered Saving Money (including Compound Interest), Borrowing Money and Investing Money.  With these in place, we're ready to release our next three in the series.  I won't divulge the titles just yet, but they're all meant to help people understand how to be more financially responsible.

Finance is Boring - But Doesn't Have to Be.

We see two big problems in learning about managing money.  First, our financial system is filled with complex terms. It's difficult to care about financial information when you don't recognize the words.  Second, most materials about finance are deadly boring.  For these next Money videos, we've put a lot of effort into making the videos easy to understand, but also entertaining and fun. You won't find finance videos like these anywhere else.

For Whom?

We often have specific people in mind when working on videos like these.  There are usually two audiences:

1. Learners - These are the people who need to learn about financial responsibility. They are students in classrooms and seminars, they are website visitors and employees.

2. Educators - These are the people who need better ways to educate others. Our goal is to provide these good people with accurate, useful and engaging videos that will help learners grasp and even care about financial responsibility. This is the audience we expect to license the videos.

Expect the first of the videos within a week from now.  We'll look forward to your feedback and ideas...

If only more people would take this seriously.