Comment by pzxc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pzxc | Hacker News Reader

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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-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.

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.

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.

I see what you're saying, and I didn't learn a lot of those specifics in school either (or actually I'm pretty sure I leaned some of them but have forgotten and had to learn again, which is basically my larger point). I'm not sure that I agree that we should be dedicating time in school to things as specific as what you listed (but maybe I could be convinced!). It seems to me that the few kids that would actually pay enough attention to a class like that to remember anything 3-5 years later when they have to start using it would find that much of it had become obselete (like your balancing check book example.) Almost everything you listed about credit cards is written in the forms you have to sign to get one anyway, if people aren't reading that I doubt a class from years earlier will help.

I do remember the first time I considered buying stocks that I literally had no idea how to do it. Like - who do I give my money to in exchange for a piece of a company? Absolutely no idea. I feel like the Internet has pretty much solved that problem though.

We should absolutely be dedicating time to personal finance while kids are in school. I especially think a personal finance class would be much more useful as a junior or senior math requirement than stats, trig, or calc in under-served communities where financial skills would be most valuable. Yes, maybe it doesn't make sense to be begin committing serious time to any topics more complicated than saving and spending management until kids are old enough to get jobs. But to argue the topic is too boring for kids to pay attention is pretty lame considering many of my peers in highschool were pretty disinterested in the whole thing to begin with. At the very least, a reintroduction of the topics every year or so would provide kids with some recognition of the topics and a more structured curriculum requiring students to track (preferably) real expenses and create budgets would probably go a long way.

My experience mostly overlapping in time in Colorado where I went to 2 high schools. The one was the bad one with fights in the halls and mostly poor kids that did not offer any accounting/finance/home economics. The good school with wealthier families had an optional accounting course which I took and it covered checkbooks and interest and we even had to read credit card fine print in one class. (The teacher looked out for her students even helped get me a job working for a CPA part time).

Kinda sad how it works out that the ones that needed it more didn't have access. A little microcosm of America I guess.

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