Comment by yed 4 days ago
> One thing that school doesn’t teach you (not even high school) is how to manage your personal finances.
Can we stop with this myth? Most states require financial literacy courses to graduate. The reason it feels like it isn't happening is because it's boring and most just don't pay attention or absorb the lessons.
> Most states require financial literacy courses to graduate
What's a state? Pretty sure we don't have those here.
Even if it was true for America (probably not), it certainly isn't true for the entire rest of the world.
Maybe they should be teaching Geography.
My mistake, it's just such a common trope in the US I didn't realize it was a universal complaint. It is true for US incidentally, people generally don't remember it because a) the learning and real world practice are too far removed b) people often are poor with finances regardless of knowledge.
All good.
I think it's common everywhere to be honest.
Here in the UK there's never been financial literacy taught at a national scale that I'm aware, there certainly wasn't when I was in school, albeit that was some decades ago now, and from what I've seen of my nephews/nieces it still isn't.
My children are still too young to worry about the minutiae, but we're already trying to teach them about income/outgoings and saving even at their middle single-digit ages.
Investing is something I can't say I'm extremely comfortable with the details of even at my advanced age besides the simple things like "I have a pension" and "I have a LISA".
I definitely think there's room for some self-service tools to aid in teaching these things to our kids from an early age.
Have you considered that "people generally don't remember it" because most of them graduated before 2020? People are going to reflect on their own experiences at school, which will often be from decades ago. If they aren't a teacher, they probably aren't going to find out about any changes to the curriculum. Maybe if they have a child, but that potentially takes an 18 year delay between implementation and learning about it if it's about a high school, if the teenager bothers to report that they had a boring finance class to their parent.
https://www.ngpf.org/blog/advocacy/how-many-states-require-s...
It's apparently now 30 states.
Your point is true in the USA, but the author appears to be from Paraguay.
> Most states require financial literacy courses to graduate.
Prior to 2020 only 8 states required a standalone financial literacy class. So a good percentage of people from the US on here probably didn't have to.
There were also states that had it integrated with another course but I'd question if they were any good. My state was like that and all we did was a 2 week project where we pretended to trade stocks starting with $1k. Which didn't even include things like dividends, short vs long term capital gains tax, etc...
We weren't taught basic things like budgeting, planning for emergencies, how loans and interest work, how taxes work, how credit scores work and affect you, etc...