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Money Lessons with Andrew Temte, PhD, CFA

Andrew Temte

Make Financial Literacy Accessible Through Compelling Storytelling

Join Dr. Andrew Temte every Saturday for Money Lessons—a weekly financial education podcast that transforms complex economic concepts into accessible, engaging stories. Each bite-sized 10-minute episode builds your financial knowledge through historical narratives and practical applications, making this the perfect podcast for anyone seeking to improve their money management skills and investment understanding.

What You'll Learn:

From the ancient origins of money and banking to modern stock markets and retirement planning, Money Lessons covers essential financial literacy topics including:

How insurance and risk management work
Stock market fundamentals and investment principles
Banking systems and monetary policy
Interest rates, inflation, and economic cycles
Credit, debt, and smart borrowing decisions
Foundational macro and microeconomic principles that directly apply to personal financial decision-making
Building wealth through informed financial decisions

Your Host:

Dr. Andrew Temte brings unparalleled expertise as a PhD in finance, CFA Charterholder, and former CEO of Kaplan Professional. With over 15 years of university teaching experience, Andy makes finance education approachable for everyone—from high school graduates to seasoned professionals seeking to sharpen their financial acumen.

Why Money Lessons:

Unlike traditional personal finance podcasts, Money Lessons uses historical storytelling to reveal how financial systems evolved and why they matter today. Whether you're learning about the Knights Templar inventing banking, the Dutch East India Company creating stock markets, or Benjamin Franklin's compound interest experiments, each episode connects past innovations to your present financial decisions.

Perfect for young professionals starting their investment journey, parents teaching financial responsibility, or anyone building a foundation for long-term wealth creation.

New episodes every Saturday. Subscribe today and start your journey of financial literacy.

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#155
Saturday · 15 min
Your Income Tax: Brackets, Withholding, and Your Refund
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explains how the federal income tax is calculated, starting with four definitions every taxpayer needs: taxable income, the tax bracket, the marginal rate, and the effective rate. He works a single filer's 2026 tax one bracket at a time to show why someone in the 22 percent bracket pays about 13 percent, and why a raise never leaves you with less after tax. From there he explains how an employer estimates withholding every payday, why a refund is your own money coming back without interest, and how the Form W-4 lets you change that estimate at any time. AndrewTemte.com
#154
September 14 · 37 min
Forty Trillion Dollars — What the National Debt Means for Your Household
In this special edition of Money Lessons, Andy takes the national debt's crossing of forty trillion dollars on August 18 and explains what the number is made of — the debt held by the public, and the money the federal government owes its own trust funds. He shows why interest now takes eighteen and a half cents of every dollar the government collects, and why "we'll grow our way out" and "inflation will take care of it" are the same answer. Ray Dalio's three-percent deficit target anchors the arithmetic, and the 2026 Trustees Reports show where the pressure lands next. Andy closes with what the debt means for your mortgage, your savings, and your benefits across three time horizons, and what you can do about it through three of the six jobs your money has. AndrewTemte.com
#153
September 12 · 14 min
Anatomy of a Pay Stub: The Deductions You Chose, the Ones You Didn't, and the Pay You Never See
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy reads a pay stub for the lines most people skip past. He sorts every deduction into two types — the ones the law requires and the ones you elected, usually in the paperwork on your first day — and explains why a health premium, an HSA, and a retirement contribution come out of your pay before your taxes are figured, and why the federal taxes don't all treat those deductions the same way. Along the way he clears up the most common misunderstanding on the stub: the Social Security line is a tax paid to today's retirees, not a deposit into an account with your name on it, and the story of the first person ever to collect a monthly check shows why. He closes on the pay that never appears on the stub at all — the employer's share of the premium and the retirement match — and why two jobs with the same salary can pay very different amounts. AndrewTemte.com
#152
September 5 · 11 min
Nudge and Sludge: The Vocabulary of Everyday Money Decisions
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy supplies the vocabulary behind three weeks of teaching on habits, defaults, and friction. Herbert Simon — who was never an economist — challenged his era's assumption that buyers decide with complete information, and won a Nobel Prize for finding those limits inside companies before anyone thought to look for them in customers. Richard Thaler named the arrangement of options in front of you choice architecture, and a decade after publishing Nudge with Cass Sunstein, he coined sludge for friction pointed at the person who has to get through it. AndrewTemte.com
#151
August 29 · 11 min
The Money Machinery Someone Else Built for You
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the money machinery listeners build themselves to the machinery that gets installed before they arrive. He starts with the default — what happens if you do nothing — and shows how much of a household's money moves according to settings that somebody at a company chose in advance. The workplace retirement plan serves as the rare example of a default that works in the saver's favor, along with a caution that plenty of employers are still exempt from it. From there he takes up friction, the effort standing between wanting something and having it, and traces how the same business will strip every step out of a purchase and then build steps into the exit. AndrewTemte.com
#150
August 24 · 20 min
The Same Old Songs: What Musical Taste Reveals About Financial Change
In this special edition of Money Lessons, Andy takes on a question that sits underneath most of personal finance: why change is so hard. A complaint about his band's setlist leads to the research on why musical taste is set around age fourteen — and to the study showing that appetite for financial risk locks in the same way, set by whatever the markets were doing when a person first had money in play. Neither one was a decision. Both feel like one. AndrewTemte.com
#149
August 22 · 11 min
Habits and Money: Why You Can't Remember What You Spend
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy opens up the machinery that moves money out of a household without ever passing through a decision. He starts with the narrow definition psychologists use for the word "habit" — a behavior repeated in the same surroundings until conscious decision-making drops out — and walks through the 2002 wristwatch studies that measured how often people's minds were somewhere else while they acted. He makes the case that habits are not a character defect but a feature that buys back mental energy, then shows why the same mechanism that makes a habit useful is what makes it nearly impossible to recall. AndrewTemte.com
#148
August 15 · 13 min
Present Bias: Why Your Future Self Keeps Losing the Argument
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the map of your personal economy to the thing that moves money across it — decisions. He explains why good and bad decisions never arrive in the same size, and why one large mistake can undo a decade of quiet good ones. The centerpiece is present bias, the mental shortcut that treats anything happening right now as far more important than the same thing months from now, illustrated by a study of 7,752 health club members who left roughly six hundred of every fourteen hundred dollars on the table. Andy also revisits four biases from March 2025 that turn up constantly in money decisions, and hands listeners a question to carry through the rest of the series: what bias is this product designed to exploit? AndrewTemte.com
#147
August 8 · 11 min
Your Personal Economy: The Six Jobs Your Money Has
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy launches a brand-new series on personal financial management by drawing the map: the six jobs your money has — earn, spend, borrow, protect, grow, and give. He explains why spending feels so effortless in a consumer-driven economy where household spending makes up about 68 percent of everything the U.S. produces in a year. Along the way, he introduces the idea that will guide the entire series: managing your money is stewardship of your own small economy, held in trust for your future self and the people who count on you. The episode closes with one simple assignment — watch the flow this week, and name the job each dollar is doing. New episodes every Saturday morning. AndrewTemte.com
#146
August 1 · 11 min
Why Timing the Market Fails: The Discipline of Owning Stocks
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy closes the series on equity by turning to the hardest part of owning stocks: holding on. He explains why volatility is the price investors pay for the equity risk premium, and why the market's steepest falls and sharpest recoveries tend to arrive back to back — which is what makes market timing a losing game. He looks at the evidence that the more investors trade, the less they tend to keep, and at how modern trading apps are built to encourage the very activity that erodes long-run returns. #financialliteracy #moneylessons #personalfinance #investing #stockmarket #markettiming #buyandhold #longterminvesting #volatility #compounding
#145
July 25 · 13 min
Why Own Stocks? The Long-Run Case for Building Wealth
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy makes the long-run case for owning stocks — why, over a lifetime, equities have rewarded the patient owner. He unpacks the equity risk premium, the extra return stocks have paid over bonds and cash since 1928, and shows how compounding turns that yearly edge into life-changing wealth. Andy closes with direct advice for young investors — start early, invest steadily, and give compounding the decades it needs to build the wealth a last-minute scramble never can. It's a lesson about patience, access, and the quiet power of starting now. AndrewTemte.com
#144
July 18 · 12 min
Why International Stocks Belong in Your Portfolio
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy widens the map beyond American markets to make the case for owning international stocks. He explains home-country bias — the natural pull to invest only in the companies of your own country — and points out that more than a third of the world's stock market value sits outside the United States. Andy walks through the two practical ways an ordinary investor can own foreign companies: broad international index funds and ETFs, and American Depositary Receipts, or ADRs, for a single overseas company. AndrewTemte.com
#143
July 11 · 10 min
Payment for Order Flow: Who Pays for Your Free Stock Trade?
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy answers a question he has been holding since last year: if your stock trades are free, how does a broker make its money? He explains payment for order flow — the arrangement where your broker sells your order to a wholesale market maker that fills it and pays for the privilege. Andy walks through why your everyday orders are so valuable, where the real conflict of interest hides, and what the 2020 Robinhood settlement revealed about the true cost of "free." The takeaway: free isn't free — and the cost that matters most is the one that tempts you to trade too often. AndrewTemte.com
#142
July 3 · 12 min
The ETF: Trade It Like a Stock, Hold It Like an Index Fund
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explains the exchange-traded fund — the ETF — the vehicle most people now use to own a whole index in a single trade. He traces it back to the first one, State Street's SPDR, launched in 1993 to track the S&P 500, and shows how an ETF differs from the index mutual fund Jack Bogle created in 1976: one trades all day on an exchange like a stock, the other prices just once, after the close. Andy pulls back the curtain on the creation-and-redemption process — the quiet arrangement with large firms that does the real index buying and keeps an ETF's price tied to the value of the stocks it holds. The takeaway: an ETF lets you trade like a stock, but the soundest way to own one is to hold it like a long-term investor. AndrewTemte.com
#141
June 27 · 12 min
What Is "The Market"? The Dow, the S&P 500, and the Index Bet You Didn't Choose
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy tackles a phrase we lean on without ever defining it: "the market." He explains what a stock market index is, where the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq-100 come from, and how each one measures the market differently — the Dow by share price, the others by company size. He unpacks the Dow's hidden divisor and the outsized power of a denominator, shows how a handful of giant companies can carry an entire index, and explains why SpaceX's arrival on the Nasdaq means millions of index-fund holders are about to own a stock they never picked. The lesson: an index is a set of choices, and a fund that tracks one hands you all of them. #financialliteracy #moneylessons #personalfinance #investing #stockmarket #SP500 #DowJones #Nasdaq #indexfunds #SpaceX AndrewTemte.com
#140
June 20 · 11 min
GameStop and the Stock Market
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy uses the 2021 GameStop saga to reveal the hidden machinery that runs underneath every stock trade. He explains how a struggling video-game retailer became the most heavily bet-against stock on Wall Street, why ordinary investors banded together to buy it, and how its price rocketed from about $17 to around $483 in a matter of weeks. Then he answers the question that left millions of people furious: why did Robinhood suddenly stop letting them buy? The culprit turns out to be the market's plumbing — the two-day settlement delay, the clearinghouse that guarantees every trade, and the collateral deposit that exploded into the billions when prices swung wildly. AndrewTemte.com
#139
June 13 · 12 min
Insider Trading, Reg FD, and Why Markets Have Rules
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explores information asymmetry—the gap between what some market participants know and what others know—and the rules that try to keep that gap from getting too wide. He walks through the structural advantages built into the architecture of the market itself, the meaningful distinction between buy-side and sell-side analysts that financial pundits throw around without explanation, and the legal line that separates productive research from criminal insider trading. Andy then unpacks Regulation Fair Disclosure—the SEC rule adopted in 2000 that ended the worst of selective disclosure to favored Wall Street clients. The closing message: the retail investor is structurally on the wrong side of many information gaps, and the most reliable response is to focus on what you can actually control. AndrewTemte.com
#138
June 6 · 13 min
Short Selling: Borrowing Shares Instead of Money
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explores one of the most misunderstood practices in financial markets — short selling. He traces the origins of the practice to Isaac Le Maire and the Dutch East India Company in 1609, walks through the mechanics of borrowing shares to sell them, and explains the asymmetric risk that makes short positions fundamentally different from owning a stock. He brings the lesson to life with the spectacular 2008 Volkswagen short squeeze, when the German automaker briefly became the most valuable listed company in the world. AndrewTemte.com
#137
May 30 · 13 min
The Quarterly Rhythm That Shapes American Business
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy picks up where last week's IPO episode left off and walks through what changes once a company is publicly traded. He explains the lockup period that follows every IPO — using Airbnb's May 17, 2021 lockup expiration and six-percent drop as the concrete example — then breaks down the SEC's three core disclosure filings (10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K) that drive the rhythm of public-company life. Andy then tackles the real cost of all this — short-termism — citing Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon's 2018 Wall Street Journal op-ed and drawing on his own experience to show how the quarterly cycle shapes corporate behavior at public and private companies alike. AndrewTemte.com
#136
May 23 · 12 min
Going Public: How a Private Company Becomes a Stock You Can Buy
In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy walks through what happens when a company goes public — how a private business with a small group of owners becomes a publicly traded stock that anyone with a brokerage account can buy. The episode covers the five reasons companies decide to go public, the underwriting process and the role of investment banks, the road show and how the offering price gets set, and what happens on the first day of trading — including why the price you and I pay is almost always different from the price the institutions paid the night before. Using Airbnb's December 2020 IPO as a concrete example, Andy unpacks the "pop" between offering price and opening price, then revisits the three risks of stock ownership from two weeks ago to highlight how cognitive biases — particularly the urge to follow the crowd — make hot IPOs especially dangerous territory for everyday investors. AndrewTemte.com

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