Miscellaneous Nuggets from a Professional Conference (AAFCS)

I recently attended the annual conference of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences. Below are some ideas that resonated with me from this meeting:

• People often learn from stories. When you hear others’ stories, you realize that they are human just like you.
   
• There are 300,000 items in an average American home and 10% of Americans rent offsite storage space.
   
• Some digital assets are under a user license that expires at the time of a user’s death.
   
• People can identify their own financial “rules of thumb” instead of using established ones (e.g., 3 to 6 months of savings for emergencies).
   
• When doing strategic planning, people should use the SOAR (Strengths, Opportunities Aspirations, Results) method instead of SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) for a more positive focus.
   
• A good activity to use for financial education classes is “Six Word Story” (summarize a topic with a photo or graphic image and exactly six words).
   
• Workers need social and emotional intelligence to succeed at their jobs. Employees are often hired for their “hard skills” (e.g., subject matter knowledge) and fired for a lack of “soft skills” (e.g., working in teams).
   
• People need to understand the emotions and previous life experiences that drive their financial decisions.