In a world of “buy now, pay later” plans and a barrage of financial influencers dishing out advice online, college students navigate lots of information about how to best manage their money. DePaul economics professor Thomas Mondschean hopes his new financial literacy course, ECO 198: Principles of Money Management, will provide clarity and equip students with the tools to prepare for their future.

Open to all majors, the asynchronous, two-credit course covers topics in budgeting, managing assets, investing and more. The extra credit hours are included in a full-time student’s tuition package at no additional cost.

“I view this as a beginning step for people to get them into it, thinking about it,” Mondschean said. “And there’s a lot of information that is coming off the internet — not all of it is good.”

Ryan Leddy, a DePaul senior studying economics, is Mondschean’s research assistant and helped prepare the course materials.

“This two-credit class about money management is really designed for those non-business students, those non-economics or finance students, to really get a better grasp on how to better their financial success in life,” Leddy said.

Professor Mondschean’s daughter is an independent documentary filmmaker, which inspired him to include a special lesson on self-employed income to serve majors who often freelance postgraduation.

“People in music and theater — if you think about it: a music student graduating, they give violin lessons or piano lessons. They’re running a business. They’re self-employed,” Monschean said. “A lot of students who graduate are self-employed — self-employment is very different from earning a salary.”

The course’s units are broken into video lectures, and students complete weekly quizzes and write discussion posts analyzing online financial content.

Jessica Perez, a senior economics and political science major taking the course, said the discussion posts “felt like being a little detective.”

Perez also said she liked seeing where her classmates were in their financial lives through the posts.

“I think one of the beautiful things about the discussion posts is seeing everybody’s at different places,” Perez said. “There’s not really like ‘Oh, you’re doing really bad in your finances’ it’s more like ‘You’re in this situation, … what is your “better off”?’”

Students in the course read “The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed and Happiness” by Morgan Housel, a mainstream financial literacy author. The book, which has sold over three million copies, is known for its anecdotal accounts about human behavior’s role in shaping financial success.

Carlos Daniel Guerrero Gaspar, a DePaul senior in the course, said he liked the stories in the book and how they illustrate that financial success isn’t only measured by the amount of money someone has, but also by how they use it over time.

Guerrero Gaspar also said he can now clearly envision himself buying a car or a home because he learned about the steps required to do so in the course.

“I can truly see a different ‘me’ in terms of the before and after,” Guerrero Gaspar said. “I feel like I’m more equipped for achieving my short and long-term goals. And not only for that, but I also feel like I can write down a path or a specific set of actions based on the course.”

Students can still enroll in ECO 198 for the winter quarter. The department is still deciding if it will be offered in the spring.

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