Organizing Financial Intelligence

This blog is purely for thought.  I’m not trying to convince you of a viewpoint, I am trying to educate you with facts and open your mind to think about this subject.  I want to talk about finances and our education system.  Where do they tie together?  Why have the richest people in our country not finished college and in many cases high school?

Education in America

I have many problems with our public school system, but today I’m not trying to complain and attack it, I am trying to learn and maybe teach.  I am sure most people realize that our public schools have almost no financial education.  We learn how to balance our checkbooks before we ever consider using checks, but that is usually the end of the line with our financial learning in school.  When we really need to know about finances, we have no input other than our parents and friends.  This is a problem because most of our parents and friends don’t know how to handle money either.

Most people will probably agree that we should have more financial education in our school systems yet we still do not.  Nowadays, almost the entire country is in debt before graduating college and most of the time before graduating high school!  That’s an early start if you ask me.  Show a college kid a way to spend money without having it and, according to statistics, they will usually gladly accept the offer.  Many credit card companies are now targeting college and high school kids due to their vulnerability.

Why no financial education?

This is not an easy question to answer.  It may be due to our voting system, but probably not.  Is it a conspiracy?  I don’t know about that, but I believe there is a partial reason.  Plain and simple, we need doctors, lawyers, teachers and other professions like these to hold our country and economy together.  If students were taught up front about taxes, especially on high paying jobs, we wouldn’t have as many of these professions.  If students realized that how you spend your money often matters more than how much money you make, we wouldn’t have so many people trying to go into the medical industry.   Many people go into a profession because that is truly what they want to do and they honestly do not care about the money, but more times people tend to do it mainly for the money they will earn and they don’t even realize that you can be just as broke earning $1,000,000 per year as you can be earning $20,000 per year.

For example, I know many people that are going into the medical industry right now and almost all of them are doing it for the money.  What they usually don’t know is that the more you make, the easier it will be for the government to tax and tax and tax.  This is why the rich people in our country own businesses, real estate and investments, but no Micro-Economics class will teach you how to become rich.  Every time bills are passed to put a higher tax on the rich, the people that are hurting are the high paid employees, not the millionaires that tie their money up in investments and corporations and barely show any income on paper.

I understand that if we taught everyone one how to be an entrepreneur and become rich, we wouldn’t have enough people to fill the necessary jobs for our society.  Also, who would teach such a class?  It would be hard to find someone who knows that much about investing and owning corporations that would want to teach.  For our country’s economic future, I think it makes sense to keep entrepreneurship to a minimum and that is coming from an aspiring entrepreneur.

Basics as a minimum

All of that being said about becoming rich and entrepreneurship, why do we not teach basic finances?  Like, If you own a credit card with x interest rate, it will take you x years to pay it off and when you miss one payment your interest rate will jump at least x percent.  We can teach are students how to buy a house and how a mortgage works.  We can teach our kids about saving, spending and basic investing, but why don’t we?  This is the final overall question…Why isn’t there basic financial education at a minimum that every student will need to know just to make it in life?  What do you think?