A panel led by two NPR personalities came to Lexington Thursday to discuss how people can manage their money.
Morning Edition host David Greene and Planet Money contributor Robert Smith visited the University of Kentucky’s Singletary Center for the Arts Thursday for an event called Family Matters: Your Financial Lifetime. Joined by a panel of experts, the two men took questions from an audience of around 75 regarding money management and personal finance. Greene says the event is an expansion of a Morning Edition piece on multigenerational households, and is part of an NPR effort to interact more directly with its listeners.
“So often we’re getting into people’s lives. We’re bringing stories from people’s homes and lives on the air, and we have listeners who just feel like they can almost touch the people they’re hearing, and here they can. We can just all be together in a room fleshing all this out together," he said.
Audience members asked the panel about a variety of topics, including college debt, retirement, and financing ongoing medical care. Janet Bodnar, a panelist and editor of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine, said while some of the audience members were pessimistic about their situations, she was pleasantly surprised at how much thought had been put into their questions.
“I don’t think you would have seen this ten years ago or twenty years ago. You wouldn’t have seen so many people on point about their finances and I think that’s a very positive thing," she said.
Apart from Lexington, Family Matters has visited other venues such as Rochester and Salt Lake City. Outreach events on different topics are grouped under the brand “NPR Presents.”