I was thinking on this subject after reading a fantastic post by Billy Manders entitled "Helping High School Kids Become Financially Educated...". A concept that came to mind, whilst pondering this nugget of a post... Is the fact that "You won't know, what you don't know, about a subject until you try to teach it". Go ahead.. soak that one up for a second...
... Okay, so my question is. How, as a population, do we expect to teach our children sound financial practices if we don't even know them ourselves?
Not only do we need to get ourselves out of a financial pickle, we need to make sure our children don't stumble into the same problem.
These two issues have the same solution, "education". We need to educate the masses on sound financial principles. If the average American has less than $3,800.00 in their savings and over $9,200.00 worth of credit card debt... then we need to show them (them being everyone) how to make good use of their income to both put away, and eliminate debt.
I'm not just talking about a little seminar on saving... or a CE class on finances. I'm talking about a national program dedicated to educating the masses. How are we supposed to teach a subject to the kiddo's that we don't even know ourselves?!
If the average savings rate is -2%... than we have an issue here folks... it's called living outside of our means. It's the real American Dream of having everything and borrowing the money to buy it with... YIKES!
I mean, tell me I'm not alone on this.
-Brendan Winans
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