Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

We got taught about basic finance. It was poor: The teacher had a friend from a care dealership come in to teach us some things. I was 13.

But more importantly: What a wide swath of folks need is how to survive poverty. So many people never get to the point of even considering a CD or IRA. Most folks only really need the bank account for paying things. 401(k) simply because that's what is offered by the employer, and you have to get paid enough to really use it. Sometimes $5 today really is more important than $10 when you retire since it means food to make it to retirement. MSA is similar: You need the extra money. No point in a MSA if you can't afford insurance anyway.

If you can't teach how to afford poverty, the rest is useless and completely tone deaf.

Likewise, most folks aren't going to open a business and many won't invest in markets.

Realistically, what we need are online resources in plain, simple english that explains these things and/or classes that are mandatory for folks starting businesses. The younger the person, the more likely the person is to be pretty good at consuming information on the internet. Just make sure folks know where to go to get good information.

I studied in Czech Republic and we had entire class spanning out over two years for economic and financial literacy at my high school. On the practical level, we were even tasked to fill out tax returns for a fictional company and we learned how to start freelancing & start a company. It was a high school in a rather small town on the south of Czech Republic, nothing special. I don't know how common this is in the rest of the country, but I remember that I and some of my classmates were leaving high school with income from freelancing already. There are very few people I know that didn't have a source of income when they finished high school.

Every recommendation to add "x" to a school curriculum should state explicitly what alternative activity should be cut to free up time. This could be another subject, sleep or childrens' free time.

For example, a better question would be "Why don't we eliminate and teach finance instead?"

everyone should a fundamental understanding of how a savings account, CD account, IRA, Roth IRA, 401(k) and MSA account work. Likewise, everyone should have a fundamental understanding of the equity markets, derivatives markets, futures markets, bond and treasury markets along with an understanding of how interest rates work and their effects on financial instruments like mortgages.

How much money do you think most people have? Half this stuff is completely irrelevant to average workers who don't have income to invest in variety or depth.

Sure, basic financial responsibility and options should be core, or near, but beyond that a detailed dive is going to supplant some other core educational area for no obviously good reason.

If you ever teach a group of kids you quickly learn that interests, personality types, needs come in a wide spectrum. Whats in the "core curriculum" and its effects are not predictable.

For example, I had French classes for 4 years and can't speak, read or write it to save my life. The teacher wasn't bad and kept telling me, who knows maybe one day I'd move to France. As a kid, I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. I was quite happy where I was.

Better option is to give ppl, at any point in their life, a route to learning when they discover a knowledge gap.

As did happen when I was sent off for work in France.

It is. When I was in high school over a decade ago, I did take a required financial literacy class. Required by the state. So yes, students do learn about savings accounts, CD accounts, IRA, Roth IRA. They learn about stocks, mortgages. Various other things (like tax returns by hand). I don't think equity/derivatives/futures/bonds were covered. Another class I took that was an elective (so not required, but available) -- and possibly took it at 9th or 10th grade -- was on business stuff including how to actually go and start your own business, different types of businesses, etc.

Even suppose you make students take a second financial literacy course, at the expense of letting them study what they want (electives), it's not going to help. Despite all the core curriculum that already exists, just because you're forced to take a class does not mean you're going to learn its material. Maybe find a better way to solve your grand social engineering problem, because "more education" isn't it, and disrupts a lot of students from actually achieving a good education because they're forced to deal with required core BS aimed at the lowest common denominator.

Generally, school doesn't teach practical things, it teaches the fundamentals for learning practical things later.

Finance by itself is not that complicated. If you know the underlying maths, that's the kind of thing you can learn on the spot, at least on a basic level. If you want more than that, you probably should hire an accountant, or it becomes specialized studies.

For the rest, I don't know what kids learn in the US but I guess things like the great depression are part of the history lessons. Do they teach that without any insight about the economics of it?

So there you have it, you know the stock market and taxes exist from history lessons and you learn the mathematical operations to run the numbers. I don't remember learning about the legal aspect of finance (which may be the most important of all), but we certainly had on overview on how the legal system works.

Schools are mainly about supplying cheap workforce for existing companies.

Learning things like starting your own company or managing money in a way that increases negotiation power of the workers, is a disadvantage for companies.

Having financial knowledge is also not always a direct requirement to get the job at a company, so actually it doesn't provide a direct competitive advantage if you are in the job seeker pool.

These 2 factors create maybe the equilibrium of the current composition of the curriculum.

My public high school in the 90s had a mandatory personal finance class. This stuff existed.

It got cut from the curriculum at some point over the years along with art, music, civics, wood shop, gym, and all the rest.

The question is where has all the money gone? Not sure about K12, but at the college level it's very clear, it's all gone to the administrative bureaucracies, with less going to the actual faculty and educational programs.

You could ask the same question about civics, or science, or shop class, or any one of the other subjects that schools have cut in order to more effectively teach to standardized tests. Most education these days is about meeting No Child Left Behind/Common Core standards, and since those standards primarily specify reading and math, well, that's what gets taught.

School isn't about preparing children with the skills necessary to navigate the modern world. School is about teaching reading and math. The steelman version is that reading and math are fundamental, and the other skills can be learned independently if the child has the necessary literacy and mathematical background. In practice, though, that doesn't happen.

Two reasons:

1) Financial rules are legal constructs - so not really suitable for academics. An academic syllabus might claim "Roth IRA implies X" then the law changes and it is no longer true.

2) The schools would be opening themselves up to legal liability if they accidental offer financial advice that goes bad (eg, invest in shares -> first time in history share market collapse -> angry people blame school).

No conspiracy, they just can't teach a moving target and the liability issues are - when you think through them - enough to be very troubling.

I don't think the problem is people not understanding tools for managing money, I think people have a vastly different ideas about what money _is_ and what its _for_.

This is largely an ethical / moral / social issue. (not sure the correct word).

I've been thinking about it a bit lately because I have 2 young kids at home just starting to earn pocket money. For them money is to spend on treats. Sometimes I can convince them to save up for something larger, but fundamentally it's something for them to spend.

It's not until later in life, when you start selling your time that some people start to see money a little differently. No "treats" are really worth that time you invested earning the money to buy them. Money is not for spending on treats, it's for surviving. (and every cent counts.) Food, shelter, clothing, tools, then as little as possible on entertainment / culture / travel.

Then even later, when you have children, you start to realize that when you spend money, you are not only selling your time, but also the time of your children, because if you can just put enough away for them to start life without debt, they'll have to sell a hell of a lot less of their time to just survive.

err, but the point I was trying to make was that not many people are taught that money is not for spending on treats, but I don't thin that's something that you can be taught in school, (would even agree with).

From a USA perspective? Universal financial education might make people realize that our explicit racial segregation became implicit economic segregation after the civil rights laws of the 1960s. California isn't expensive by accident :/

In my ~15 year education in the UK I don't think I ever learned a single thing about how the UK government or the EU works. And I am sure I am not unique in this. I had to pick all that up from TV, articles etc. This might go some way to explaining the total political mess the UK is in now.

Sure it is interesting to learn about the Romans and the Vikings. But we could easily cut out 50% of that and replace it with learning about how the government works. Or maybe the people designing the curriculum would rather keep us in the dark?

I think to an extent financial education suffers from the same problem as CS education: it's hard to find teachers because those who understand the content can make much more money as practicing professionals than as teachers. It's really a shame because those two sets of skills are very important. Most of my self-learning has been in these topics, to fill in the gaps left by my formal education.

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that the moneyed class doesn't want everyone to understand money and finance. People uneducated about marginal tax rates are more likely to vote down tax increases, turn down raises because they'll "go up a tax bracket", and not try to change the difference between tax rates on earned and unearned income. People who don't understand retirement savings are less likely to meet their 401k match, or ask awkward questions about why the 401k/IRA/Roth/pension system is so confusing and convoluted, and so geared towards earning financial institutions fees. People who don't understand monetary policy, deficits, and fractional reserve banking won't make a fuss over QE or have an opinion on interest rates, and can easily be manipulated with cries of "OMG deficits! Irresponsible government!". People who don't understand debt and cash flow will make shortsighted decisions like financing expensive vehicles or taking out payday loans. All of this is beneficial to capital owners (yours truly included).

Using Hanlon's razor though, it's more likely that educators themselves don't understand this stuff so don't consider it important to teach. Most parents don't understand either, so they don't demand that it be taught. And those few parents who do understand its importance just teach their kids by themselves.

We called it “home economics”, which went the way of the dinosaurs with gun safety training, auto shop, wood shop, Metal shop, and welding shop.

I wonder what changed. :-/

I think it's important as well, but I'm not sure it belongs in a school.

The thing school needs to give you is the ability to learn on your own. In order to do that, you need to know the basics of reading and writing, the basics of math, and the basic theory of knowledge. That last one is sorely missing, but that's another story.

You then want a superficial survey of everything humans know. Of course it cannot be anything but superficial, there isn't time after you know how to read, write essays, and solve some differential equations. In the end you're going to focus on the same old things that everyone thinks are important: a bit world/national history/lit, a bit of the headline sciences (phys/chem/bio), and a bit of foreign language and culture.

At best you will end up mentioning the following in passing: economics, psychology, cooking, citizenship, health, the law, and so on.

But yeah someone ought to mention that there are worthwhile fields of study that you'll have to learn on your own.

I would argue that most people in life will never even go near the stock market let alone be expected to learn all those different bits and pieces.

How would that help the average high school graduate?

We’re not taught about money in the UK, either. At least we weren’t when I was at school.

What a difference it would make in the land of payday loans, cheap car credit, buy-to-let mortgages and betting shops.

Two things to consider.

1. The purpose of school: To produce a basic worker who wont question authority and to keep a large segment of the population out of trouble for a majority of the working day (babysitting). School hasn't really changed much since the late industrial revolution with the exception that child labor laws mean more kids stay in and complete school.

2. A typical high school student completes 25 year long classes in order to graduate. Those typically include 4 Math, 4 Science, 4 Social Studies, 4 English Language, 2 Foreign Language, 1 Art, 1 PE, 2 General Purpose (Health, Speech, home EC, etc) 4+ Electives (Sports, Band, Shop, Ag)

What are you going to get rid of to open up some time in the kids schedule to teach finance? You can't take away electives, parents and college like to see their kids involved in things.

If we are going to change the curriculum, are there not more important things to our society to teach? A basic medic class, philosophy, ethics?

I think a one year "Life Skills" class should be added. But the question is, what do you teach. I know too many people that didn't have some really basic skills coming to/out of college. Things like cooking basic meals, doing laundry, basic home upkeep (how to clean to basic maintenance), hygiene and self care, budgeting (this is where basic finance could be taught), or how to drive (for those of us in car dependent places).

In The Netherlands, some of what you wrote is what we got if you took am economy profile and the elective management and organization (a euphemism for accounting, lol).

I didn’t take the elective but did take the profile. It taught me how (central) banks work and how to do causal thinking in economics. I still use that kind of thinking to trade stocks (and I noticed that when I come up with an original idea then my stock trading goes quite well, too early to tell if it isn’t simply luck though).

This isn't true for all countries. I did my high school in India and I had to do tax returns (ex. calculate taxes for a working couple w/ mortgage, investment income, PF (401k) etc.) and financial calculations (compound interest etc.) as part of math class. I think it was in 10th grade ?? Don't know.

This is the baseline. Certain streams in high school had full blown booking keeping courses, accounting practices and stuff in 11th and 12th grade.

I grew up in Massachusetts in the 90s and in my interpretation, finance was not taught in grade school (K-12) because school systems and teachers had a belief that learning about money would "defile" children and cause them to become money-grubbing greed mongers.

This is potentially a by-product of Puritan forms of thinking (the same thing that causes happy hour laws in MA to be draconian, and no liquor allowed to be sold on Sundays). I have no doubt early education is much more progressive now, but this is just how I experienced it.

I actually did have questions about money back then, but teachers would always shoot me down when I asked. It's possible this was because the teachers themselves didn't know the answers to my financial questions, making this a generational vicious cycle.

So in Ireland:

In junior cycle (the first three years), we had a mandatory module "Business Studies". It had two purposes, the first was an introduction to the basics of the more specific modules available from your chosen modules in senior cycle (Accounting, Economics and Business). The second was to cover personal financial details, so it covered household budgeting, pensions (at a shallow level, e.g. defined benefit vs defined contribution and employer contributions never came up, because most students were not going to be in a job where they had much choice), how taxes are calculated (but not how to file returns, thats mostly only a concern for self employed people) and consumer rights. There was also a brief sole trader vs coop vs limited company overview, but my understanding is the senior cycle business module covered this in more detail.

If you then went on to do economics for senior cycle, bonds, equity and futures were covered.

IRA was more a discussion for the history classes however (the different meaning in the US leads to bemusing alternative reading of US ads for Irish people)

I suspect schools do not teach financial education deliberately. Large segments of the economy are entirely dependent upon poverty spending, such as fashion and media. If the population generally became financially literate fewer people would buy shit they don't need. What is Nike going to do when everybody stops buying Air Jordan's to save for a down payment on a house?

Not that I'm defending it, but:

The answer is for the same reason that practical skills in general aren't -- cooking, cleaning, how to purchase a car or home, how to review an apartment rental contract or put together a resume, how to raise children, how to mount shelves, how to do laundry.

Education is designed pretty much solely as a feeder system for professional skills, starting with reading and numbers and performance, and then in high school figuring out who will have what it takes to be able to go to college and major in math or English or violin (or professional finance), so they'll be able to eventually become engineers or lawyers or orchestra members (or accountants).

Combined with education as a citizen, which is why we also learn history and a little bit of literature.

For better or worse, it's assumed that you'll be able to pick up all the practical skills on your own, armed with your foundation of reading and math and "critical thinking".

This would have to be mandated by the state (at least in the USA). The state already mandates that they must spend x hours teaching math, English, etc. The schools don’t have enough leeway to just add in another required course. Most likely something would have to give. Maybe replace one of the required math classes with a required finance class?

Thinking through the question, I think a slightly better question would be : Why isn't finance a part of the core curriculum at high school/college (before under-grad ?)

I honestly can't answer this from the school's POV ( perhaps an elective/extra credit whatever should be a good motivation for students) but a couple of things that parents can do and should do before the said kids reach high-school etc:

This can be made as a ritual from a young age where kids can be taught basic concepts whenever pocket money is given and can be given slightly more advanced lessons as they age. Shouldn't take more than 30 mins a week and might actually help kids learn the importance of this way before they get some informal education from the real world.

Brb time to teach my 6 year kid how many cents are there in a dollar ;-)

You can't just tell people how much taxes they are paying...

Eg in Slovenia (small EU country with 2M people) many workers (even old ones) have no idea how much money the country takes from their wage.

In school we covered stuff like "compound interest" but no-one ever thought us anything about taxes.

We have a net, gross and a gross-gross wage (gross-gross being the actual amount the company pays for the worker).

Most aren't aware of the gross-gross wage. The difference between gross and gross-gross is that it's basicaly the same taxes as between net and gross, but around ~80% of it. So this part is never talked about. When job wages are specified it's always in gross. So basicaly most workers truly don't see that the actual taxes are almost double than what they see in the difference between net and gross pay..

From listening to some people who have managed billions dollar for public and private sector, there is a huge incentive from financial elite to suppressed financial and legal education to the general public (macro and micro). Many fraudulent activities are hidden between fancy legal and financial jargons. And finical education is made to be something boring.

Seems it is matter of learning about 200 to 300 or so specialised terms.

Would be good idea to make a github page about these words. Anyone?

Here is example of a US lawyer that has taken upon himself to learn about these words:

https://thedailycoin.org/2020/08/12/the-feds-silent-takeover...

When I was in middle school in US public school in the 90s, we had a Home Economics class where we were taught how to balance a checkbook, and that was about all the financial literacy that was covered.

Personally, I agree that it was a huge disservice to most students, and I think that a better general life skills class (I'd probably lump in civics/voting, dealing with various bureaucratic/administrative tasks, effective online research, personal privacy, how one might evaluate various professional services, resume writing etc) that includes basic financial literacy would be much more useful than just about anything else taught in school (to me, learning to socialize, properly empathize, and to reason and critically think are even more important, but also generally not part of most standard curricula).

After college, I got very into FIRE and personal investing, and eventually a while back put together my own basic financial literacy guide. It boiled down first to budgeting and calculating expenses (especially discretionary expenditures) vs earnings (As a school lesson, I think being forced to try to figure out a budget of a single parent on a minimum wage would be pretty eye-opening). For a general class, a practical lesson on tax filing would probably be worthwhile. And then for investing I agree about covering the general landscape of various savings and investments work, but more focused on in-depth/concrete lessons on fundamental concepts. Compounding, tax-advantage, dollar cost averaging, correlation, and rebalancing would basically cover it I think.

I think learning about how money (and debt) works - I'd argue that most people don't have a great understanding of that at all, some basic macroeconomics, and maybe some freakonomics type topics for color would be useful as well, but I don't think that financial literacy needs to go beyond the very basics to give everyone a bare minimum framework to be able do their own research/learning. But I also generally think that should be the goal of every topic taught, which seems to be rather at outs with mainstream teaching and learning practice in American public education.

We learned personal finance in my public high school here in Australia, there was a dedicated humanities course (which includes wills etc too) but it also got touched on in maths with compound interest, probability, etc, where we used real life examples like gambling. And there were economics and business studies electives if you were into that.

It was useful, but I think these sorts of topics really benefit from life experience. When you haven't had to pay many bills yourself, it's hard to know what's important and it's mostly a meaningless jumble. Chances are that most kids forgot most of it by the time they moved out of home. But at least it's always easier to re-learn than to learn.

I was exposed to some basic personal financial planning when during high school. However, it was (and still is) part of the curriculum of the JROTC program (among other things like managing stress, first aid, map reading etc). The focus was more along the lines of setting up a budget and not spending more money than one had/earned.

I am not so sure that teaching kids in high school about the various types of interest-bearing accounts or the different markets for financial instruments would be as valuable as simply teaching the basics of how interest works. That way those students who continue on to college can make a more informed decision should they need student loans to help pay tuition.

According to Yanis Varoufakis, politicians these days are not so smart anymore because the best, youngest and brightest realize the true power is in finance. He also said bankers have figured out a way to use money to buy laws and use laws to make money.

6th Grade US, early 70s. We made fake checkbooks, we were given an income, had a small school store to spend it, had to balance checking and savings accounts. Learned about S&P 500 and looking up stocks, only avail. in book form at the time. I cannot fathom why parents don't require more from their schools - oh wait, yes I can - I moved from a city to rural where the hate for intellect(uals), schooling, academics is still palpable and stated, preferring instead comic books, baseball, football, truck cult, farming, hunting days off is prevalent, as stated to me directly.

It seems school curriculums are inherently very conservative. By default, like any other organization, you keep doing what you did last year. With very little outside competition or other forces for change, inertia dominates.

I am a proponent of Personal Finance training at high school. Life would be much more objective for people when they evaluate decisions based on relative benefits they get rather than making mistakes due to emotions.

I read somewhere that the reason is that it helps to keep the social classes intact.

However that doesn’t match my experience at all. I received pretty good financial education from my public middle school and public high school. I learned a ton about stock trading, business creation, and entrepreneurship. Just hosting a virtual stock trading simulation with the classrooms was plenty good enough. It forces you to become good at stock picking and asset allocation.

This is something I thought about too, this should be the utmost priority to pass on to kids in school but they don't. I became somewhat financial literate late in my twenties and about 20K in debt. I'm debt free now but is something I wish they could've taught me in school. I sometimes wonder if this is done on purpose, after all consumerism is what empowers our economy here in America.

> Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

Unless something has radically changed since I was in high school, high school “economics” is pretty much exactly personal finance.

Certain states are now adding this to the curriculum. The problem is that it falls under social studies and history teachers are in charge of teaching this, and they are largely under prepared.

I am actually trying to solve this problem over at https://www.getmedes.com/

Do you really need to know all this?

My High school taught us tax brackets, interest, how to calculate a annuity mortgage, make a plan for a business etc..

Most kids just forget after the exam or the year after.

Understanding what a savings account is and understanding different corporate structures are quite different levels of financial literacy.

I'm not sure how someone could not understand what a savings account is (you put money in, get a crap amount of interest, eventually take money out. What's to understand?) But i agree with the general premise. However corporate structure might be a bit more than needed.

Fwiw in canada (alberta) we had a class that covered the basics of financial literacy.

Studies show that formal financial education does not help people make better decisions. People tend to make the decisions their parents make. Classes teach people to regurgitate knowledge but rarely to apply it.

https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/education/improving-fina...

My financial literacy was learning to live without - I think it’s an important mindset that has helped me stress less about finances in the rat race sense.

that's a great question!

I'll try to answer as a parent in CA/US, where I spend most of my time (for some other countries, they don't actually have such a huge looming financial sector, other countries seem to go for the "focus on the fundamentals and the rest will follow" approach)

Elementary to middle school in CA seems to be about having fun and getting a sticker, many times I heard "these grades don't count anyway". Kids learn stuff that's "fun" and read books that are "fun", that's about it - except maybe a couple of semi-serious classes in the later grades. Even if they did teach finance, due to young age it probably wouldn't even register.

High school seems to be a mad dash for college-like credits and classes. If it doesn't serve either (1) student's interests (e.g. sports), or (2) college requirements - core subjects or easy A's, or (3) the current district agenda (scrambling for test averages, or common core, or SAT or lack thereof, or whatever the hype of the year), it will get little attention. Finance doesn't really seem to fall into any of the above.

There is a need for the education yes (completely). But there is also a crying need for both tools and regulation.

Mint was a sort of step in the right direction - but basically we need software (agents) to be in the fight on our side - here is the list of your outgoings - 40% of people cancel their Gym subscription after three months - do you want to cancel yours?

Add on to this regulation - the EUs new Open Accounts (?) directive is a huge step.

If you have a good grasp of math you can distill these into a pamphlet briefly describing what they are. I don’t think you’ll have any luck teaching the difference between a 401k and IRA to innumerate kids that have never had a real income. There are so many online resources to learn about this. I would rather children learn the academic fundamentals rather than random facts they will need to learn anyway

In Poland, a study from 2017 found that:

  *  58% of population thinks they don't pay the VAT tax
  *  21% of population thinks they pay no taxes at all

https://www.bankier.pl/wiadomosc/21-proc-Polakow-uwaza-ze-ni...

LOTS of schools in the US use the Ramsey Education curriculum (https://www.ramseyeducation.com/). There are strong opinions on both sides when it comes to Ramsey, but they're well respected and sponsored by some pretty big players, to put their curriculum in schools.

In Canada: Grade 10&11 business classes that involved project management, marketing, budgeting, technical skills tracking numbers with spreadsheets, and just some general accounting principles.

It doesn't exactly overlap with what you are saying, but it doesn't leave you an idiot either. Plus in Canada a lot of the taxation and investment vehicles are much simpler giving a lower barrier of entry.

I think even more important to learn is how we "act" about money. Kids need to learn the psychology of money/finance as much as the knowledge about it. Just finished Morgan Housel's "Psychology of Money" and it should be required curriculum (every year) for high school and especially college students. When my kids are older, they are definitely reading it!

Instead of adding more to the curriculum I think we should remove everything and let people learn what they're interested in.

People are illiterate on important topics (finance is a great example, politics another one) because they've been spoonfed everything they need in the short term, not realising how little they're actually learning in school.

I have no idea why finance isn't part of the core. Truly, it should be.

A financially literate person can make a good life out of an ordinary income. A financially illiterate person can bring catastrophe on themselves and others around them, in spite of an extraordinary income.

Financial illiteracy hurts individuals, families, and society in general.

It is true for Europe too. We are not taught about money in schools. Is is a conspiracy theory? The fractional reserve banking system is what shocked me when I came to watch the money as debt video on YouTube. The more loans you take out to by stuff to impress the people whom you don't like is a live an kicking in the world.

Edit typo

I have grown up in eastern Europe. In the high school we have a subject called "przedsiębiorczość" (entrepreneurship). If I remember correctly 1h per week.

My teacher was a guy that has his own small IT shop, and he was really excited about having his own (albeit small) business. Unfortunately he cannot teach us anything usable, because he had to follow the official curriculum. Which was about demand and supply theory and economics importance to the modern society. All theoretical stuff without any practical use. The other thing was that I was living in post-communist country, where people generally disregarded entrepreneurship. Everyone that has money was think of as a criminal or a person that takes bribes.

When I was attending university, my economy knowledge was very low. I only heard about so called incubators (you may think of them as watered down startup accelerators for students with good ideas) on my last year there. It never occurred to me to start my own company as I was a student.

Now I regard this times as a wasted opportunity. I really envy people that are 4 or 5 years younger than me. In these 5 years mentality changed and now I see a lot of people starting their own companies or joining US startups (at least here in Warsaw). The law was also simplified and some barriers were lifted (e.g. amount of cash needed to start LLC company). And I ended up working at late stage US startup...

I'm surprised Khan Academy hasn't been mentioned yet: https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-fi...

Our high school in a small town in the middle of the USA has a personal finance class that is very good. It isn't a "core" class but most students end up taking it due to the need to acquire credits to graduate and the relative lack of other elective classes.

I believe most high schools (at least in California) have an economics semester that covers a lot of loosely finance related topics. And actually mine had a work experience class that did cover basic personal finance / talked about compound interest.

There are a lot of underlying components to this question as with anything that's ever existed or will exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA

Agreed, but you can do something about it right here, right now. What book would you recommend for people teenagers or adult, to learn about personal finance? and how to manage a budget for instance.

Hell, I’d settle for much more basic finance than that. I know people who have turned down jobs that would bump them into the next tax bracket, thinking it would net them less. In their thirties.

You should ask the Federal Reserve, we essentially have had a zero rate interest policy since 2008. With no incentive to save... buy buy buy all you can! Take out some debt while you are at it.

We in Austria have such courses. It was in the core plan of the public school I was on. I think two years long. One or two hours a week. It was as called "economic and economic law".

In response, I'd ask this question: "Which teachers are qualified to properly teach finance?" Many of the current comments presume that there are a qualified group of teachers.

Much of public school curriculum is politically determined, thanks to changes in the past 30 years or so--No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and other crud has left public ed a mess. So, 'core' classes are all tied to state and federal testing, because testing is tied to funding.

People always have pet subjects they think are 'essential' for public education: Robotics! Computer Science! Coding is the new literacy! Teach kids to balance a checkbook! Learn to use spreadsheets! Start getting college ready in kindergarten! And so on.

Really, the public question is always 'what is education for?' The answers have always been varied since public school began. Today, the answer is largely determined by political money disbursement.

TL;DR: It's all about money ain't a damn thing funny. --Grandmaster Flash

I grew up in a family that had money problems.

That was the best education for me and my brother: we pay our bills on time, have no debt and no creditcard. The best schooling is life.

Usa here. In my "economics" class in 2007 our teacher gave us a handout on ergonomics and the rest of the semester she put on VHS tapes of ghost files.

Because (in the US) school isn't about teaching life skills - it's about teaching to the standardized tests and pushing everyone to go to college.

I have the opposite question: Why is our financial system so complicated it requires such an in depth education just for basic participation?

To judge from the results of education, we want illiterate, docile consumers with little understanding of history, science, and democracy.

You're going to have a hard time teaching finance to people with almost no money to manage.

One of the issues with teaching finance to kids is that is a) boring and b) not applicable for the kids who need it most. If you are a wealthy kid whose parents allocated you a big savings account or stock portfolio to "play with" in high school, that's one thing. If you're a poor kid just getting by, finance seems like "a rich person's playground".

I was the child of two immigrant parents. Growing up, we were always on the verge of bankruptcy as a family. Always about to miss a mortgage payment or a payment behind. Yet I grew up in a wealthy New York suburb so I was surrounded by a lot of kids described above, whose parents were overjoyed to teach their kids financial principles using inherited family wealth.

I got lucky in my own way. By the time I was 15 or so, I knew how to program a little, and was already an avid internet user (this, in the late 90s). Thus, I could do a little programming, and do web design projects for money.

So I started to build up savings, real cash savings, by the time I was 16. But then, it dawned on me: my parents weren't going to be able to afford sending me to college. So, I knew I had to build up savings in the few years leading up to freshman year to pay for college.

Then, I got into college (thankfully with a big scholarship) and dumped my savings into tuition and living expenses. I also continued working through college and took on student debt. By the time I was 19 or 20... I was very interested in finance. But I still operated entirely on a cash and debt basis. With $100K in loans, depressed savings, and parents entering retirement age with no savings other than the home equity they had in my childhood home. It's at that moment that some financial education would have helped me a whole lot.

I bring this up because I consider myself fortunate. People less fortunate than me never manage to build up any savings whatsoever in high school, and, if they are so fortunate to go to college, are drowning in way more debt and student loan payments than they can afford. By the time they enter the workforce, they are still digging themselves out of that debt, not yet thinking about the marvels of savings, capital investment, rate of return, and compounding interest. I worked for a couple years on Wall Street and made every mistake possible in this regard. I saved money in a 401k with crappy allocations that didn't perform well, leading into the 2008 financial crisis. I did an early withdrawal on that 401k to self-fund my startup. I operated on a cash & debt basis for years while earning sweat equity on that startup, and never diversified personally until very late.

I suspect for most young adults in a wealthy country, the moment when finance education would make the most impact is either senior year of high school or in college itself, or in the first year or two of work. If you teach it any earlier than that, it'll be in one ear, out the other.

When I used to work in Brooklyn, the local library held financial literacy courses targeted at young adults in NYC, scheduled for after work hours. I attended one and it was very well put together, and very well attended. I think that might be the best timing/setting of all for this.

Maybe because there already isn't enough time to adequately expose and train kids to much more fundamental ability/knowledge(?) Basic arithmetic being one, and w/o it most of any finance-related knowledge lies out of reach.

Why waste time on something that you will pick up in life anyway with a little common sense? You're not going to randomly pick up Newtonian mechanics or derivatives, but you will learn about taxes from your family/friends.

Savings account, CD account, IRA, Roth IRA, 401(k) and MSA account are all smoke and mirrors. Finance traps our smartest people for what? What we should really do is boycott inflation and invest in bitcoin.

I agree but also want to point out how sad this is. In the past 50 years or so the world changed. You can no longer win by just working for a salary and putting your extra money in a savings account and collecting a pension if you were lucky. There’s an entire complex capitalist casino out there where all the real money is made. We can all only hope to have extra money so we can buy our chips and play too. So every doctor, every engineer, every professor, every one of us now needs a second education in the complexities of modern finance if we don’t want to be left behind.

It's a political topic - learning about economics is slighlty more relative than learning about physics. I'm from a country that used to be socialist and when people hear that "Self management and the basics of marxism" used to be a mandatory school subject, they're usually disgusted and call it brainwashing. I absolutely agree that it's very useful to learn about the inner workings of the system you live in, as it gives you perspective. Even if you disagree with it, it's better to know how it works.

This would be like teaching slaves to read in the pre-civil war South. It would allow any child to rise above the worker bee status. Not something wanted by todays powerful businesses and institutions.

Finance doesn't create value, most of the times actually destroys it. Moreover, you're looking at this with a clearly US-centric perspective, in many other countries we don't need to know about retirement schemes, school loans and health insurance policies (you seem to have forgotten that insurance IS finance, but this might be just another example of the reason why this is hairy).

So, if tomorrow all of this changes, you'll have millions of people with really useless knowledge. And who changes these things? Politics. This is politics. Won't it be better that people learn about politics, philosophy and history so that they have the tools they need to actually understand and change the world around them?