TL;DR: Financial Literacy for Employees of Washington Public Schools: Optimizing Financial Decisions Based On Your TRS Benefits

by Karl Fisch

You know you need to learn more about personal finance in order to make financial decisions, but you just find it too overwhelming, too intimidating, and too time consuming. This book was written for you, giving you the basics in a couple of hours, and then directing you to further resources ( fischlearning.com/tldr-washingtontrs/ ) if you’d like to learn more. It’s about 120 pages and should take only a couple of hours to read, so instead of TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) it will hopefully be JR;DR;KM (Just Right, Did Read, Know More). This book isn’t about “getting rich quickly” (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but it’s about gaining knowledge and building your capacity in order to live a good life. What’s a “good life”? We don’t know, everyone’s definition is different. What’s important is that you take the time to define what a good life is for you, and then align your financial decisions with that. The goal of this book is to help you think about your finances in such a way that you have the independence to lead the life you want to live; to give you as much control as possible over your financial situation so that your finances don’t prevent you from living the life you want. We say “book” because that’s what Amazon calls it, but it’s more like a series of blog posts. We wrote it because finances and financial decisions are such a huge part of everyone’s life that they should take the time to thoroughly educate themselves. Since many folks won’t do that, this book is an attempt to quickly give them the basics and hopefully encourage them – and give them the confidence – to learn more. Part 1 of this book is applicable to everyone, but Parts 2-4 are specifically for employees of Washington public schools. These parts take a medium dive into both your TRS and your school district benefits, and how you can optimize your finances based on those benefits. Most Washington educators are not fully aware of their TRS benefits and how that should impact almost all of their other financial decisions throughout their adult lives. This book will help you make those decisions. Full Disclosure : We are not financial planners. We have no formal training in personal finance or investing, and no certifications. We are simply lifelong learners, constantly curious, and have been interested in personal finance since working in a credit union during high school and college (Karl), and since his grandma emphasized the importance of saving (Adam). Karl has continued to learn about finances his entire adult life and has frequently served as a resource for friends, family and colleagues. He somehow became the "go to" guy in his high school for other educators who had questions about school district benefits, PERA (Colorado’s pension plan for public employees), and just finances in general. Over the past several years, Adam has become known to his colleagues as a financial and retirement go-to for questions on how to better understand options. He is also on the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) track, with an emphasis on the financial independence part of it. Partially as a result of these experiences, we see the necessity for a book such as this, so we wanted to do our part to try to help Washington educators become financially literate and optimize their financial lives based on their TRS benefits. While it would be nice to make a little bit of money from this, that’s not really our expectation or our goal. This is a passion project for us. We hope you find it helpful. So, about 130 pages. Maybe a couple of hours. Let’s get started.

141 pages, Hardcover

Published March 14, 2022

Reviews

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first resource I've found that provides information specific to Washington educator's retirement and pension information that is easy to understand.