business

Laura Dreier wants to buy a house someday.

A busy 25-year-old, Dreier has a husband, two children and a job in the office at Tartan High School in Oakdale. She's getting financial advice from an unlikely place: John Cocchiavella and some of his classmates in the school's "Building Wealth" course.

Cocchiavella, a senior at Tartan, suggests that Dreier put money into riskier mutual funds to yield more growth over the many years she will be working. Cocchiavella selected a few that he thinks should work. Dreier says she's satisfied with the advice and is pleased that it's free.

Dreier has heard too many stories over the past couple of years, she says, and is unsure how to find professional investment advice. "I wouldn't know the difference between a good guy and a bad one," she says.

Not everyone is forgoing professional financial advice these days, or should. Dreier's situation results from fate rather than fact -- and from Craig Spreiter's plan to teach his students about personal finance through real-life experience.

"I want to teach them not only to understand what they are doing but to be able to explain it to people," Spreiter said. That requires the students to dive into spreadsheets and background information on companies and mutual funds, said Spreiter. "They need to be able to use these tools to solve a problem."

Every year thousands of students play the Stock Market Game, which tracks hypothetical stock trades by participants in a competition.

The game, not used in the Tartan class, is intended to help students improve their math and financial literacy, according to the SIMFA Foundation for Investor Education, its distributor. No money changes hands and nobody loses if they make the wrong decision -- it's just a game.

But at Tartan High, Dreier could lose money if Cocchiavella and other students who have given her advice are wrong.

To make their recommendations, students were allowed to look at staff members' financial profiles and studied the mutual funds available for investment. They researched the funds' long-term performance, their managers' performance and costs.

Spreiter says he doesn't expect his students to do as well as professional investment advisers. But surprisingly, the kids made the same fund selections 92 percent of the time as the professional fund manager whom Tartan teacher Lori Raebel has used for years.

"I was kind of surprised by that," Spreiter said.

Raebel says she was considering reallocating some investments when the opportunity to be part of the project arose. She's not going to abandon her investment adviser, but she did compliment the students.

"It was authentic and real and they were looking up real stocks and helping real people," Raebel said.

There's been strong demand for the students' services. About 10 staff members wanted to participate, but Spreiter had room for only four.

Kelsey Wegner, a student in the "Building Wealth" class, may end up taking her own advice. She wants to be a teacher. "They don't make a lot of money," Wegner said. "So I'll probably have to do it by investing."

She says she's discovered a truth about investing: Even if you look deeply into it, "you learn you can't necessarily predict what a fund is going to do."

Gregory A. Patterson • 612-673-7287