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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

One big problem is that we in general do not teach good money management in schools. Impoverished kids could at least be exposed to the principles of sound financial practices from K-12. What they actually get is maybe a few weeks of "personal finance" as a unit in a High School social studies or economics class. Too little, and too late.

All kinds of ways to do this. Younger kids could be shown how regular investment compounds over time using games that pay out the reward at the end of the school year. Older kids can do mock investments in mutual funds, etc.

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I feel like I fall in that camp. I received no formal money training, and frankly saved terribly when I was younger. However, I don't believe education was the problem, I believe maturity was.

I still don't know what I'm doing, but I've got a nice nest egg, I seek knowledge on how best to handle my excess money, and my wife and I are executing her higher interest school loans.

I really don't feel I have that much more knowledge than I did. I simply have the will to plan for my future life. In my early 20s I just didn't care (for various reasons).

Kids learn all sorts of things that they ignore. As a race, we seem to be really good at shooting ourselves in the foot.

Related to education though, I feel that these patterns of ignoring what is good for you is what is really at fault here. This has wide reaching implications in my mind, and is the cause of anti-intellectualism in America that is quite concerning. We just don't.. care, as a society. Until we do, I don't foresee education on finances drastically improving quality of life.

Note that I of course will always back education, I'm definitely not advocating against it. I just see this as part of a really large problem, and I've got no idea how to solve it.

I've said this a lot, and I've heard others say it too. I've recently been talking to my sister (a 1st grade teacher) about it and the conclusion we've come to is that even if there was a class it would do little good because of how little high school education sinks in. Most students just don't care enough to learn a boring life skill like money management.

I think your idea of having younger kids start learning this early (before its "uncool") is key. My sister says 1st grade is probably a little too early. I think maybe 3rd-6th might be right to start introducing the concepts.

Anything would be better than what we're doing now.

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