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Nearly half of consumers living paycheck to paycheck, couldn’t pay for $1K expense
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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As I've commented on here before, I think that personal finance should be part of K-12 core curriculum.
The entire extent of what my K-12 education covered was how to write a check and how to balance a checkbook in 5th grade. And, in an optional driver's ed class, we had to get sample insurance quotes from multiple insurers to drive home the fact that you should get multiple quotes. That's all I got in 13 years of formal education.
My home economics class in maybe...7th grade?...didn't touch personal finance at all. Basic cooking skills, clothing repair, some arts and crafts.
Personal finance is something that basically everyone needs to know, and as things stand, basically they only get from their parents and that's gonna depend on what their parents know.
In the US, curriculum is determined at state or below. It looks like California revised its curriculum to include a high school personal finance class as of 2024, and students will start taking it as of 2027.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/personalfinance.asp
I think that that's probably a good move.
I don't see a reason not to teach more about personal finance. How interest works. Consequences for missing payments. I knew a guy that when he was 18 just maxed out several credit cards to buy fun stuff. He got out of that hole eventually, but it was a rough couple years.
I think there's an underlying problem that I don't know if you can just teach people, but I think people need to be better at delayed gratification and thinking about consequences. Like that old friend of mine, even if he knew that the credit card debt was going to be more expensive long term, he wanted the tv and stereo now. I don't know if you can teach that.
And, even if you could, it's fucked up that people who are poor through little fault of their own are told to just live with less, while people born into wealth can squander it.
So, at the end of this tangent, we should have mechanisms so the floor is high enough people can still have a decent life, and the ceiling is low enough that no one has four mansions.