Alan J. McMillan
Alan J. McMillan, founder of LearnEarnRetire, teaches a Fall 2018 Wealth & Poverty course designed to help students develop an early strategy for employabilty and a financial plan for being smart with their money—all aimed at financial independence over the course of their careers.
CAS 2402X: Transitions – From Campus to Career Success to Wealth Creation & Protection is a 2-credit course that teaches students how to navigate from campus to career to financial independence.
This course provides outcome-based life skills to enhance a student’s career and path to financial freedom. Students will leave this course with:
- Career Plan of early strategy for employment an employability over time.
- Financial Plan for being smart with the money they earn and a path to their potential financial independence.
- Personalized Plan that they can refer back to as a resource over the course of their career.
“Students are asked to visualize what they want from both their careers and their lives. From those outcomes, we teach them to reverse engineer to their current reality at Ohio University today. Then we have them chart a realistic plan to those goals,” McMillan says.
Since the advent of the 401K in 1978, companies have by and large abandoned pensions in lieu of employee self-managed defined contribution plans. These employees had little to no personal financial training.
“We use the case study of the current Baby Boomers, on the doorstep of retirement, and discover what happened to them. Most wish they have been wiser with their money and started earlier to build their financial independence,” McMillan says. “Motivated by the lessons of the Boomers, we inspire today’s students to do just that. And the great news is, if they begin immediately post-college, and make modest contributions in a conservative and well diversified way, they can dramatically enhance their chances of reaching financial freedom they are seeking.”
So what should today’s students focus on?
- Get a job.
- Thrive and advance.
- Change jobs efficiently when necessary.
- Be smart with their money.
- Develop a path to financial freedom.
Lessons from the Boomers
Employment: A couple of generations ago the average American worker had one or two jobs. The department of labor estimates that the Boomers, the parents of the millennials, on average will have 10.7 jobs. Some estimate that the millennials will have around 17 jobs over the course of their lives. Jobs or roles within a company are two- to four-year stepping stones in the new economy. Students need both tactics and strategies to step wisely. CAS 2402 delivers on this need.
Financial: Since the advent of the 401k in 1978, companies have by and large abandoned pensions in lieu of employee self-managed defined contribution plans (usually in the form of a 401k). Those employees had little to no personal financial training.
How did the Boomers do?
- Of 46- to 64-year-olds, 60 percent have less than $25,000 saved or invested.
- The average amount in a 401k at retirement is three times their last year’s compensation, yet the experts say they need six to eight times.
- Research says only 46 percent of Americans spend less than they make.
- For 36 percent of people on Social Security, all they have is Social Security.
“The bottom line is that we did not teach critical skills to the Boomers, so they were forced to learn as they went,” McMillan said. “As we pass the baton to this next generation we can, we should, and we must do a better job of teaching them critical employment and economic skills to have a stronger and more certain outcome.”
About Alan McMillan
McMillan graduated from Ohio University with an associate’s degree in 1975. He spent 38 years in high tech sales and marketing, serving four times as a vice president of sales in Silicon Valley. He was on the senior management team twice where they took their company successfully into the public market.
Mid-career, he attended MIT where he became an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow earning his master’s. He retired from high-tech and founded LearnEarnRetire, which lead him to speak and publish to 18- to 20-something.
He is qualified to teach this class because he made a lot of mistakes professionally and financially and from those, and research, developed materials to give Millennials great advantage. He has done four major job searches in his career and in the process became good at it. He joined the senior team at Hocking College to turn enrollment around, is retained by Syracuse University Athletics to teach life skills to athletes, publishes at LearnEarnRetire, and other prominent sites.
On this journey, McMillan has presented this material to more than 10,000 students live. Their support and feedback has fueled his passion for this mission.
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