The PFR Pedagogy: How We Practice Getting Rich

As a professor, I often hear my colleagues lament the state of financial literacy in the U.S. They point to declining mathematical literacy and the rising complexity of modern markets. There is certainly truth to their concerns. However, our research and experience suggest the "literacy gap" is far less about a lack of information—it is a lack of a decision-making system.

The knee-jerk education standard when facing a literacy gap is to provide more information. We are taught that if a student doesn't understand a concept, the solution is more textbooks, more lectures, and more data. In the modern era, this old habit is now counterproductive.

The true hurdle of personal finance isn’t an external "get more information" challenge; it’s an internal "How do I make decisions with an overwhelming amount of information?" struggle. In today’s GenAI-driven world, the barrier to information is quickly vanishing. If a student wants to know the difference between a Roth and a Traditional IRA, they can find an effective explanation in seconds. The problem isn't a lack of data; it's the paralysis or bias occurring when trying to process it.

About the author:  Jeff Hulett leads Personal Finance Reimagined, a decision-making and financial education organization. He teaches personal finance at James Madison University and provides personal finance seminars. Check out his book -- Making Choices, Making Money: Your Guide to Making Confident Financial Decisions.

Jeff is a career banker, data scientist, behavioral economist, and choice architect. Jeff has held banking and consulting leadership roles at Wells Fargo, Citibank, KPMG, and IBM.

The Filter for Human Judgment

We must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. While we are all "infected" with cognitive biases—a fundamental part of our humanness—the goal of the PFR Pedagogy is certainly not to bypass our psychology. Our psychology contains our values, our goals, and our unique human judgment, all of which are essential for a well-lived life. The challenge is not to eliminate our psychological impulses, but to filter them.

The real hurdle is differentiation. Our integrated psychology provides us with intuition containing both "features" and "bugs." The features are heuristics—the mental shortcuts providing accurate, lightning-fast judgment. The bugs are cognitive biases—the glitches leading to irrational, biased behavior.

Because our intuition originates in a part of the brain lacking language, we receive the "signal" without a label. We feel a strong pull toward a decision, but we cannot instinctively tell if the pull is a "feature" of our wisdom or a "bug" of our bias. I remind the students that all people are impacted by cognitive bias. Successful people are those who learn to manage their cognitive biases with a decision system.

How do we separate "good judgment"—the intuitive wisdom aligning with our long-term happiness—from the negative effects of cognitive bias? I can teach financial theory until I am blue in the face, but if a student is not armed with a personal decision system to filter their own psychology, that knowledge will never be implemented. The system provides the language and the framework to audit and properly implement the intuition, allowing students to keep the "features" and filter the "bugs." The decision system grows with the student. As the student's intuition evolves, their decisions need to evolve with it.

Our research and experience provide the basis for how our neurobiology and behavioral psychology impact our personal finance success. 

Choice Architecture Meets Personal Habit

To solve this, we utilize choice architecture, the decision technology of behavioral economics. If psychology is the lens through which we see the world, choice architecture is the tripod that steadies the camera. It doesn't replace the photographer’s eye; it removes the shake.

In our classroom, we use this framework to build a "cognitive sieve" for integrating both structural systems and personal behaviors. A decision system is only effective if it is supported by consistent habits. We don't just teach students how to analyze a stock; we teach them how to automate their savings, how to build good "friction" into their spending habits, avoid the bad friction of "sludge," and how to create a repeatable decision environment where the right choice for them becomes the default choice.

We practice a three-step cycle every single week:

1. Identify the Bias: Recognizing traps like loss aversion, status bias, or the "present bias" triggering impulsive spending.

2. Isolate the Judgment: Stripping away the emotional noise to see what truly matters to the student’s long-term goals.

3. Validate with a decision system: Using data to see if the "gut feeling" holds up, and then implementing the decision system.

Whether a student is simulating buying a house or getting a robo-advisor, the topic changes, but the decision system stays the same. As I share with my students, in this room, we are practicing getting rich.

Our research, experience, and student feedback suggest the reasoning necessary for personal finance augments language acquisition, consistent with Bloom's Taxonomy framework.

Math Intuition Over Formalization

I still teach math, but I’ve abandoned the traditional "plug and chug" philosophy in favor of math intuition. Mathematician David Bessis offers a wonderful perspective on this; he describes math as "the language of that which we can't easily see or touch." He is absolutely correct. It is nearly impossible for the human eye to "see" how a small, incremental saving today will transform into massive wealth decades from now. This is the "magic" of compound interest. The non-linear math itself is not the hurdle; rather, it is the difficulty of trusting and implementing a math-based intuition that feels counter-intuitive to our linear-thinking brains.

In our pedagogy, the app handles the math in the background. I will show my students the calculus of compound interest or the matrix algebra of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), but I do not test them on formalization. I test them on what the math means.

For example, truly grasping that compound interest starts slow but hits a vertical acceleration point after about 15 years is a "math intuition" that changes lives. By letting the app handle the dy/dx, the student is free to focus on the implications of the data. This allows them to build a high-level "number sense" without getting bogged down in the mechanics.

Our experience and student feedback are augmented by our primary research on building student mathematical intuition.

An AI-Forward Future

Our approach is also intentionally AI-forward. We believe teaching students to partner with AI for making financial decisions is a critical, modern life skill. It isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about using technology to pressure-test and accelerate our decision system. Learning to prompt an AI to analyze a mortgage contract or compare insurance premiums is a necessity for graduating into today’s workforce. It becomes part of their personal workflow—a habit of using the best tools available to ensure their judgment remains clear. As we discussed in class, the human/AI "2-for-1" brain is increasingly becoming table stakes for employers. AI partnership is a positive employment byproduct of our pedagogy.

Our experience and student feedback are augmented by our primary research using AI in the classroom.

Practice Makes Permanent: The Power of Simulation

There is a saying by poet Sarah Kays: "Practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent." It is in this spirit we seek to routinize the student's decision process over a three-and-a-half-month semester. We do this via simulation.

Every week, we simulate a different high-stakes life decision: buying a car, choosing a college or graduate program, evaluating a job offer, buying a house, buying a car, selecting a robo-advisor, etc. By simulating these milestones, we practice a consistent, repeatable decision system that students will use throughout their lives. In this classroom, we aren't just studying theory; we are practicing getting rich by making the process of "good choosing" a permanent habit.

My book, Making Choices, Making Money, is fully integrated with this choice architecture, behavioral habits, and AI-driven workflow. I wrote it to be a timeless resource—a manual a student can pick up a decade after graduation to refresh the systems and behaviors they mastered in my class when they face a major life milestone. The students are enrolled in our ongoing monthly email curriculum. After the semester ends, this curriculum reinforces the habits of the rich.

The Proof is in the Pudding

At the end of the day, the results speak for themselves. The students love the class. The PFR Pedagogy is now taught from middle school through college, and these courses are regularly rated by students as the most frequently referred classes. PFR provides instructor training to help their students achieve long-term wealth and personal security.

Our approach helps teachers succeed because the teaching system does the heavy lifting. As much as I’d like to think I’m a great teacher, I know it’s really the system itself that makes me look good—and inspires me to be good. By the time our students leave, they don't just have financial facts; they have confidence earned from practice and ingrained behaviors. They feel confident making great decisions in a dynamic, constantly changing world.

Our students are READY TO LAUNCH!

Check out the PFR curriculum and tools: College and University

Middle and High School