The last president to balance the U.S. budget was in Los Angeles Sunday to preach the value of budgeting and saving money to at-risk kids.
Bill Clinton spoke at the "World's Largest Financial Literacy Education Event" at USC's basketball arena.
“If you want to be powerful, if you want to live your dreams, if you want to get an education and make the most of it, you’ve got to know how to handle your money,” Clinton said.
More than 7,000 at-risk youths from Southern California were expected to gather for the event, where Clinton, former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and others explained why it's important to create budgets and understand financial principles -- something Clinton said schools don't do a good job teaching to students.
Clinton called financial literacy "a very fancy term for saying spend it smart, don’t blow it, save what you can, and know how the economy works" and credited it for turning his life around, saying no one would have expected he'd be president as a kid.
A judge from the Guiness Book of World Records was scheduled to be on hand to certify that the event is in fact the largest financial literacy gathering in the world.
