This Zicklin Prof Is on a Mission to Make Students Financially Literate

Psst. Here’s a secret, Zicklin students: Just because you study business doesn’t mean you know how to manage your money.

“I spent 12 years trading billions in currency on Wall Street,” says Casey Halliley, an adjunct lecturer in the Bert W. Wasserman Department of Economics and Finance. “I was surrounded by people who, like me, were obsessed with making money, yet there wasn’t one minute that anyone taught me anything about my personal finances.”

That’s why Halliley is on a mission to teach young people all about building wealth. “Your twenties are your most powerful financial decade and you’re never too young to start learning about personal finance,” she says. “The principles are pretty simple: Invest, live below your means, don’t accumulate too much debt, have an emergency fund, understand taxes, and diversify your income stream.”

Halliley covers all these topics in a series of four one-minute videos produced by CUNY called “Money 101.” The videos were the brainchild of CUNY senior producer Lisa Beth Kovetz, who with the support of her supervisor, Annette Calderon, parlayed her own passion for personal finance into a succinct, informative video series.

It’s no surprise that when it came to casting “Money 101,” Kovetz turned to the Zicklin School of Business. The three spokespeople in the video series hail exclusively from Zicklin: undergraduate student Dominique Desplas (BBA, ’26), an economics major; graduate student MD Miah (MS Business Analytics, ’27); and Halliley herself. MD came to Kovetz’s attention thanks to an undergraduate internship with the New York Jobs CEO Council that led to a full-time job as an analyst at JPMorgan Chase. Kovetz knew Dominique from working together on a different project (although, coincidentally, she had taken Halliley’s class, Personal Finance and Individual Investing).

Halliley started teaching at the Zicklin School after leaving Wall Street to start a family and realizing she wanted to engage with young people, who “have so much potential. They’re starting their careers, being offered 401k plans, being offered loans, and so on. Something as simple as understanding compound interest makes a huge difference.” So she started offering personal finance classes at corporations and universities; after cold-emailing various CUNY colleges, she got a call one day from the former chair of the Wasserman department offering her a job.

Teaching finance was radically different from working in finance, Halliley soon discovered. “The content came easily, but I had to teach myself how to teach,” she admits. “People are overwhelmed by this topic, so I try to make it as simple as possible.” To make things memorable and understandable, she uses stories, analogies, and uncomplicated examples.

Halliley’s favorite analogy is the orchard, the namesake of her company—the Orchard Method—and a book she’s currently writing. It’s an illustrative concept: “If someone gives you an apple, you can eat it, make applesauce for future consumption, share it, or take a seed from it and plant it,” she explains. “If you tend that seed and are patient enough, it’ll turn into an income-producing asset—a tree that gives you apples every fall.”

Summing up, Halliley—who has four children of her own—notes that today’s college students face unique challenges to understanding personal finance.

“Younger people are heavily influenced by social media. They have a flood of information now, far more than we did at their age, but our information was probably much more reliable,” she says. “Now they have to filter their own information, which is more of a challenge. Not to mention the fact that social media creates a constant temptation to spend. My kids see these people on Instagram showing off their wealth and I try to hammer into their heads the concept that in the real world, you have to live below your means.”

Categories: Alumni News, Current_Students, Faculty, News, Student News