We demand that school teaches our children about sex and driving and argue how to explain the beginning of the 
universe. Why don’t we have a class in high school that teaches basic personal finance?
I’m not talking about economics. Even if it’s an elective, I believe we need a class at least available to students who want to learn how to manage money in a responsible way. We need to teach them how to avoid the consequences that result from bad money management. This course could change the courses of their lives and set them up for success.
Instead, the classes have a challenge for them to get a random salary and then ask them to make a budget. Fine. That’s fun for most of them, and challenging for others. But when you tell a seventeen year old to budget a household on $18.00 an hour, it paints a very unrealistic picture in his mind about how he will be able navigate the world. If he drops out of school, despite you begging him not to do so, and then seeks work without a GED, will he make $18.00 an hour? Not likely.
I say we give them ALL minimum wage salaries in the challenge and see how they are able to pay their bills. This might drive someone to strive for more out of life.
I don’t remember when I was taught how to balance a checkbook, but it had to be in school, sometime. And I’m pretty sure my parents showed me, too. I do remember learning about stocks and investing some, and having that contest to see who could pick the best stocks at the end of a period of time. If you were eighteen, making your first money, would you? Could you afford to be that risky with your money in the stock market?
I remember being in high school. I was a teacher’s aid several times, so I didn’t have to take P.E. again, because everybody knows Erica doesn’t like to sweat. I even took a class on Folklore and I loved my teacher, but I’m afraid the only thing I really remember about the class is something about the Maypole dance. And I don’t know if I could use that knowledge for anything productive in my life now, but if I had been offered a beginner’s class on finance, I like to think I would have opted to take it.
Oh, and we talked about the price of peanut butter in the little jars versus the large jars in economics. But what about PERSONAL economics? How did that peanut butter translate to my life? I don’t know if I made that connection in school. It was in the years after high school, when I started living on my own, paying my own grocery bills that I finally “got it.”
Nobody talked to me in high school about saving for my own retirement.
Nobody taught me about credit scores and how having a high credit score could keep my interest rates, mandatory deposits, and even my insurance rates lower.
I was fortunate enough not to have to worry about student loans, but I know a lot of folks are struggling for years with huge balances, unforgiving interest rates and un-bankrupt-able student loan debt. I remember at college when the credit card companies would set up tables at the campus student center, offering free tee shirts to us for signing up for credit cards. I even signed up for a credit card at the beach! By the time I graduated, I had at least six credit cards in my name. Fortunately, my mother had taken the time to show me how credit cards worked. I also, having graduated with a math minor, have an unusually high affinity for anything with numbers, including how interest is calculated on credit cards.
But what if you’re not taught at home? What if your parents worked two full time jobs and you had to fend for yourself until everyone landed at the homestead for dinner and even then it was rushed, and then on to the next: homework, showers, good nights?
Or what if your parents were lousy financial examples and you don’t want your life to be anything like theirs?
Now everyone has their own phone and we talk even less when we are home together. Kids in school now have even more to do, and I see how this would potentially add to their stress, but I feel it’s necessary. I just don’t see kids looking up debt worksheets on their phones to teach themselves about money. No, it’s whatever broke the internet that day. Or, what’s that app? Instagram? Snap Chat? I’m not hip. But maybe you, your child, your niece, your grandson, maybe they’re special and wouldn’t need this class.
So, what am I saying here? They need a class? Yeah. Yeah, I do think they need a class in high school that teaches personal finance. They need someone to develop a curriculum with spreadsheets and charts and tests to see if they absorbed the information.
Yeah.
A real class. With a syllabus and handouts and worksheets and everything!
I can see it in my mind:
1. Cash
a. It’s a method of agreed-upon value assigned to currency
b. Why is it not wise to depend solely on cash?
2. Checking, Debit Accounts
a. How to write a check
b. How to balance a checkbook
c. What is overdraft? How does it work?
3. Saving
a. Why it’s important
b. Basic Savings Vehicles and how they work
1. Standard Checking
2. CODs
3. Money Markets
c. Saving for Retirement – 401K, 403B, TSP, ROTH & Traditional IRAs, and the magic of compound interest
4. Credit
a. What is credit? Who is FICO and why’s that number so important?
b. How to earn good credit.
c. How to ruin your credit
d. How credit affects interest rates on loans and credit cards, security deposits, even job prospects.
5. Loans/Debt
a. Why debt is dangerous
b. How to stay out of it
c. What you do to get out of it
6. Bankruptcy
a. What is it?
b. What are the consequences?
7. Taxes
a. How are they assessed?
b. What happens when you don’t pay.
8. Bonus Materials
a. Side Hustles
b. Spending Wisely
c. Investments
What would you add? And, who?
Who’s going to teach this class they so desperately need?
Another teacher? Before or after all the coaching they do? She doesn’t have time. What about the one who supervises In-School Suspension all day? Maybe he’s had enough.
Me? Oh, Heavens. No, I couldn’t. I haven’t taken the six years of developmental education classes that are required to talk to our youth.
WHO? Who can teach this class? Can you? Will you?
~Erica
The original post was first published on Owningburtonfarm.weebly.com on June 15, 2016 and has since been edited.