5 ms·

I have a very vivid recollection of 8th Grade Civics units on personal finance, budgeting, and tax management. In this unit we were awarded a salary through a l

I have a very vivid recollection of 8th Grade Civics units on personal finance, budgeting, and tax management. In this unit we were awarded a salary through a lottery system and had to learn to live within the means of our salary. Students would pair up and find homes to live in by reviewing ads in the newspaper. We would have to learn to set aside money for savings, groceries, and for fun. We also learned how to invest in the stock market and also filled out the paperwork to file 1040EZ tax returns. This was all in 8th grade public school in Virginia around 2001. I thought this was normal, and it saddens me to realize the inequality in education across the nation.

grahamburger 9y ago
I'm pretty sure your experience is pretty normal for the US. Lots of people forget that they had several classes that taught basics of personal finance, few people actually didn't have those classes.
- cm2012 9y ago
  I didnt
  - rfeather 9y ago
    Ditto.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  I went to private schools in CA and never had classes like these either.
- pzxc 9y ago
  I believe you are completely incorrect, but fortunately the tide is turning. This article points out that 17 states now require personal finance education in high school, but 20 years ago only one state did (Illinois). http://www.businessinsider.com/high-schools-teaching-personal-finance-2015-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/high-schools-teaching-persona... I certainly did not have it myself, and my K-12 years were from 1985-1998 in Indiana (public school). We had an accounting class. We had a government class that taught how a bill becomes a law and all that. We even had a home economics class where we learned how to make pillows and pigs-in-blankets. But no personal finance whatsoever, and certainly no economics until college. I distinctly remember approximately 15 minutes of relevant personal finance education in all my primary school years, when one math teacher went off-curriculum at the end of a class to show us the magic of compound interest. (It blew my mind) Everything else, from balancing a checkbook (no that wasn't taught in accounting) to filling out tax forms to how credit cards work was either taught by my parents or self-learned through social context. You do realize how many poor college students have been taken in by credit card offers that used to be right on campus to sign up gullible freshmen, don't you? Fortunately I think that has fallen out of practice (it got enough publicity that colleges now realize it makes them look bad, I think). But for how many years have millions of 18-year-olds fallen into this kind of trap? You think any of those people had personal finance classes? I seriously, seriously doubt that. I think the vast majority of Americans (until recently) did not have any such formal education on how to navigate money in the real world. I don't have any idea the prevalence of this kind of education in other countries, though.
  - grahamburger 9y ago
    Just because it's not required doesn't mean it didn't happen. > You think any of those people had personal finance classes? Yes, I'm almost certain some of them did. All the education in the world won't make good decisions for you when you once you set out in your own. We've been teaching kids sex ed for decades but we still have STDs and unwanted pregnancies. You really never had any other math teachers assign problems related to compound interest, investments, credit cards, savings accounts? I was in school just 2 years later and these problems were very common in the math books we had.
    - pzxc 9y ago
      The math books teaching the formulas for calculating interest is not the same as personal finance education. As a geek of course I knew all the formulas, I couldn't even take a math class my senior year because I took Calculus as a junior and they ran out of possible math classes for me to take. But although I knew all the formulas, nope, I can't recall any math problems, or any explanations/descriptions, relating to: how credit cards work, minimum payments, grace periods before interest starts, the fact that after paying interest you have to pay it off and wait a full period before the grace period resumes, how balance transfers work... and that's just credit cards, and just the basics, not the more advanced topics like travel points/cashback, signup bonuses, churning, etc which you probably shouldn't be teaching kids anyway. Nor was I ever taught anything about savings accounts, tax-deferred retirement accounts, stock investing, etc. Although I hear stock investing in particular does come up in a lot of schools because it's "fun". But I never had any teachers let us play the stock market for fun, I totally would have been into that. I was never even shown a tax form in school, let alone had it explained. I was able to do my own taxes because my dad showed me how. My mom showed me how to balance a checkbook, although that rapidly became useless knowledge when I could start monitoring my account online on a daily basis :) The rest I just kinda figured out, or didn't. My dad told me credit cards were bad but never explained them, ended up getting in debt, have been out of debt for a few years and now use credit cards responsibly -- "pay off in full to get the cashback, never pay interest". Nope nobody ever told me that either.
      - 9y ago
- the_jeremy 9y ago
  I don't know about that. In my school district, there was a 5th grade field trip where we had "jobs" that paid "money" we could use to buy trinkets at the other shops the other kids worked at. That was the limit of my school teaching financial literacy. We never learned how to file taxes, how to invest or what good investments were. There was a high school elective course about personal finances, but because it was an elective and sounded boring, none of my friends took it. I don't think it is especially hard to learn how to invest, but I suppose getting to the point where you know the right questions to ask might be hard without knowing people who know the basics.
rconti 9y ago
Nope. Graduated HS in '99, not a word about personal finance. Yes, time value of money calculations in some math classes, but nothing about actual personal finance. No civics, no home ec. Just math, science, humanities, etc. Granted, I went to a very tiny public school... but still.

grahamburger 9y ago

I'm pretty sure your experience is pretty normal for the US. Lots of people forget that they had several classes that taught basics of personal finance, few people actually didn't have those classes.

cm2012 9y ago
I didnt
- rfeather 9y ago
  Ditto.
wutbrodo 9y ago
I went to private schools in CA and never had classes like these either.
pzxc 9y ago
I believe you are completely incorrect, but fortunately the tide is turning. This article points out that 17 states now require personal finance education in high school, but 20 years ago only one state did (Illinois). http://www.businessinsider.com/high-schools-teaching-personal-finance-2015-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/high-schools-teaching-persona... I certainly did not have it myself, and my K-12 years were from 1985-1998 in Indiana (public school). We had an accounting class. We had a government class that taught how a bill becomes a law and all that. We even had a home economics class where we learned how to make pillows and pigs-in-blankets. But no personal finance whatsoever, and certainly no economics until college. I distinctly remember approximately 15 minutes of relevant personal finance education in all my primary school years, when one math teacher went off-curriculum at the end of a class to show us the magic of compound interest. (It blew my mind) Everything else, from balancing a checkbook (no that wasn't taught in accounting) to filling out tax forms to how credit cards work was either taught by my parents or self-learned through social context. You do realize how many poor college students have been taken in by credit card offers that used to be right on campus to sign up gullible freshmen, don't you? Fortunately I think that has fallen out of practice (it got enough publicity that colleges now realize it makes them look bad, I think). But for how many years have millions of 18-year-olds fallen into this kind of trap? You think any of those people had personal finance classes? I seriously, seriously doubt that. I think the vast majority of Americans (until recently) did not have any such formal education on how to navigate money in the real world. I don't have any idea the prevalence of this kind of education in other countries, though.
- grahamburger 9y ago
  Just because it's not required doesn't mean it didn't happen. > You think any of those people had personal finance classes? Yes, I'm almost certain some of them did. All the education in the world won't make good decisions for you when you once you set out in your own. We've been teaching kids sex ed for decades but we still have STDs and unwanted pregnancies. You really never had any other math teachers assign problems related to compound interest, investments, credit cards, savings accounts? I was in school just 2 years later and these problems were very common in the math books we had.
  - pzxc 9y ago
    The math books teaching the formulas for calculating interest is not the same as personal finance education. As a geek of course I knew all the formulas, I couldn't even take a math class my senior year because I took Calculus as a junior and they ran out of possible math classes for me to take. But although I knew all the formulas, nope, I can't recall any math problems, or any explanations/descriptions, relating to: how credit cards work, minimum payments, grace periods before interest starts, the fact that after paying interest you have to pay it off and wait a full period before the grace period resumes, how balance transfers work... and that's just credit cards, and just the basics, not the more advanced topics like travel points/cashback, signup bonuses, churning, etc which you probably shouldn't be teaching kids anyway. Nor was I ever taught anything about savings accounts, tax-deferred retirement accounts, stock investing, etc. Although I hear stock investing in particular does come up in a lot of schools because it's "fun". But I never had any teachers let us play the stock market for fun, I totally would have been into that. I was never even shown a tax form in school, let alone had it explained. I was able to do my own taxes because my dad showed me how. My mom showed me how to balance a checkbook, although that rapidly became useless knowledge when I could start monitoring my account online on a daily basis :) The rest I just kinda figured out, or didn't. My dad told me credit cards were bad but never explained them, ended up getting in debt, have been out of debt for a few years and now use credit cards responsibly -- "pay off in full to get the cashback, never pay interest". Nope nobody ever told me that either.
    - 9y ago
the_jeremy 9y ago
I don't know about that. In my school district, there was a 5th grade field trip where we had "jobs" that paid "money" we could use to buy trinkets at the other shops the other kids worked at. That was the limit of my school teaching financial literacy. We never learned how to file taxes, how to invest or what good investments were. There was a high school elective course about personal finances, but because it was an elective and sounded boring, none of my friends took it. I don't think it is especially hard to learn how to invest, but I suppose getting to the point where you know the right questions to ask might be hard without knowing people who know the basics.

rconti 9y ago

Nope. Graduated HS in '99, not a word about personal finance. Yes, time value of money calculations in some math classes, but nothing about actual personal finance. No civics, no home ec. Just math, science, humanities, etc. Granted, I went to a very tiny public school... but still.