By COLlive staff
Most Jewish families never learned how money works. They never learned financial literacy in school, at home, or in their communities. By the time they ask for help, they are in their 30s and 40s saying, “I wish I had known this earlier.”
A Jewish family with four or five children now needs roughly $150,000 a year just to cover the basics before saving a single dollar. Collective Kindness’ own accounting of typical family budgets has revealed approximately $200,000 in gross pay to net it in a high-tax state. Day school tuition can run as high as $30,000 a year per child before scholarships. Housing, kosher food, costs that cluster around Shabbat and the holidays, insurance, a car, camp, clothing and the giving that is not optional in observant life stack up a significant income before a single retirement account is funded.
Collective Kindness today publicly launched CK Academy to make sure the next generation of Jewish families is equipped to navigate this math. CK Academy is the first nationwide movement dedicated to teaching financial literacy across the Jewish community, helping Jews at every life stage develop the practical knowledge needed to set up their lives correctly. Its work combines online courses, written guides, structured homework, one-on-one guidance counselors from within the community, in-person events, and programs.
The launch arrives just after the 2026 TIAA Institute–GFLEC Personal Finance Index reported American adults answered only 47% of basic personal-finance questions correctly, the lowest score in the index’s 10-year history. Adults with the weakest financial knowledge are four times more likely to struggle to make ends meet.
CK Academy is the education arm of Collective Kindness, the nonprofit behind Kosher Debt Help, which has erased more than $3.8 million in total interest for over 1,240 Jewish families since its launch. The Academy is the preventive counterpart to that work.
“You cannot coach a person from soft skills to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” said Shalom Goodman, co-founder and executive director of Collective Kindness. “That ceiling is structural, not motivational. Most of the existing Jewish job-placement models assume a $90,000 to $110,000 role is the goal. For a large Jewish family, that role does not clear the bar. It is not assistance, it is the same family back in our office a year later.”
CK Academy’s first offering is “Newlywed Financial Mastery,” an 8-part video course for Jewish couples in their first years of marriage. The course, presented by healthcare executive and business development strategist Yosef Nathan, combines short video lessons with written guides, structured homework and guidance counselors who walk each couple through the curriculum step by step.
It opens with the lesson the Academy considers the most expensive to learn late: a 25-year-old who puts $300 a month into an account that returns 9% reaches roughly $1.4 million by retirement. Someone who begins the identical habit at 45 reaches about $500,000.
The gap has nothing to do with effort or income. It is two decades of compounding the late starter gave away. The lesson is already moving people. Collective Kindness soft-launched the course a week and a half ago. 150 couples signed up and nearly 80 people opened retirement accounts.
The eight chapters cover compound interest, career clarity, budgeting against real Jewish family line items, debt and credit cards, the financial checklist young couples are rarely given, growing income, major life decisions like housing and cars, and giving and legacy. “Newlywed Financial Mastery” is the first of numerous courses planned for parents, established families, students and anyone who feels behind on something no one bothered to explain to them.
“We are building the layer that makes the intervention unnecessary,” Goodman said. “We got tired of meeting families too late.”
VIDEO:
CK Academy exists so Jewish families can live securely and give generously, built on the Rambam’s eighth and highest level of tzedakah: helping a person before they fall. The community stopped waiting for families to figure out finances on their own.
The first 250 applicants can use code COLLIVE to receive the course free of charge. Sign up at https://collectivekindness.net/academy/newlyweds-course
