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Oklahoma Schools Required To Teach Students Personal Finance
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Paula Burkes reports that under legislation passed in 2007, Oklahoma students, effective this May, now must demonstrate an understanding in banking, taxes, investing, loans, insurance, identity theft and eight other areas to graduate. The intent of personal financial literacy education is to inform students how individual choices directly influence occupational goals and future earnings potential. Basic economic concepts of scarcity, choice, opportunity cost, and cost/benefit analysis are interwoven throughout the standards and objectives. 'Oklahoma has some of the strongest standards in the country,' says Amy Lee, executive director of the Oklahoma Council on Economic Education, which lobbied for and helped develop the curriculum. 'Where other states require four or five standards regarding earnings, savings and investing, Oklahoma has 14 standards including three that are state-specific: bankruptcy, the financial impact of gambling and charitable giving.' The law is designed to allow different districts to implement the curriculum in different ways, by offering instruction in various grade levels, or by teaching all the curriculum in a single class or spreading it across several courses. 'The intent of this law was always to graduate students out of high school with a strong foundation in personal financial literacy to reduce the many social ills that come from mismanaging personal finance,' says Jim Murphree. 'I cannot think of anything that we teach that is more relevant.'"
Maybe students will fully understand the ramifications of going deep in to debt to with student loans.
A story about Oklahoma that doesn't mention Christians, rednecks, or hillbillies? I don't get it, this is news for nerds. We need someone to look down on. How am I supposed to get my Two Minutes Hate on?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I can get behind this type of teaching. As the summary states, there is nothing more relevant to someone graduating from high school with no real experience or specific working knowledge that is not self-taught.
It's actually unfortunate that they left it up to the districts as that means there will inevitably be multiple districts where it is planned, or taught, by someone who has no clue about it themselves.
Hey, why can't California or New York or Massachusetts have this?
Maybe they're too busy with stupid shit?
Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice
There's nothing progressive or liberal about the dolt that wrote that - that's just leftist statism/fascism talking. One wonders where such a moron learned that freedom is something to be given up for her perverted idea of "justice".
This was required in Oregon when I was in high school. I was amazed to discover it wasn't mandatory everywhere.
When I was six years old, I figured I was old enough to ask for an allowance.
"Mom? Can I have an allowance?"
"No Mike."
"But Mom! I want to buy my own candy bars."
"No Mike."
I begged and pleaded for like an hour. Finally Mom agreed to twenty-five cents a week. That meant that every two weeks, I could buy my own candy bar!
The following week I asked for my allowance. "What allowance?" Mom replied. I broke down in tears. "But Mom, you said I could have twenty-five cents a week." "No I didn't."
She did finally give me just that week's twenty-five cents. After that I gave up on even asking.
I have an older sister. When mom would treat the two of us to a movie, she would give my sister the money for both of our tickets. Mom pointed out that because Jean was older than I, she was more responsible with money.
I was down with that. Jean was three years older than I; the maturity difference between six and nine years old was obvious to me even then.
But when I got to be nine, Mom would still give Jean the money when treating us both to a movie. Even when I was in high school.
The end result of my own mother not trusting me with money, and not wanting to teach me to handle my own money, is that I did not finally figure out how to handle money ON MY OWN until I was a half-million dollars in debt! I am not fucking kidding.
Even the IRS, while the hassled me quite a bit, wrote me off as uncollectable. The California Franchise Tax Board, Maine Revenue Services and Canada Revenue Agency didn't exactly write me off. They just stopped calling.
I expect Citibank would like to know where I am. If they ever find me, I will declare bankrupcy.
But now, I'm a wizard with GNUCash, OpenOffice Calc, Excel and Quattro Pro. I don't have no accountant. I don't need no stinkin' accountant. I know how to read financial books.
However it is quite unlikely that I will ever purchase a home again. If I ever do it will either be because I scored options with a successful startup, or a start a successful business myself.
If you have a child yourself, you could save them - and yourself - a lot of trial and tribulation if you buy them a piggy bank at the very first opportunity. That would be when the could be trusted to handle a penny - yes a one cent piece, or your own national currency equivalent - without sticking it in their mouth and asphyxiating.
Get one of the ceramic piggy banks that does not have a cork stopper, so you have to break it open with a hammer.
When your chillun sees what has become of his financial management upon cracking open his or her piggy bank, raise his allowance to a nickel.
Do this the right way, and they'll put themselves through college, as did a close friend of mine from high school. He was promoted to manager at McDonalds when he was eighteen, and had only just the week before graduated high school.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
Absolutely. Long overdue.
step in and cry foul that schools shouldn't be teaching kids to be wise with the finances as it will upset the delicate balance of free enterprise.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
You are correct to the extent that you are discussing the proposed Pay It Forward plan, in which tuition is free, but one pays a fixed fraction of one's income for twenty-five years after graduation. One does not have to pay if one does not have income, and one's debt is forgiven after twenty-five years.
But to the best of my knowledge the Pay It Forward plan has yet to actually be implemented anywhere.
Student loans are funded by banks, and guaranteed by either the states or the federal government. The government pays the interest while you are in school, but if you are not enrolled - even if you haven't graduated - you have to start paying, even if you don't have a job.
A while back I calculated that student loans are actually just welfare for the banks. For the government to pay the interest while you are in school, as well as to guarantee the loan, so that the government pays if you default, costs the taxpayer more money than if the government just gave you the money outright, say with the Pell Grant that I received starting in 1982.
However if any legislator were to propose that we eliminate student loans, but then used the money saved to give outright grants, the banks would see to it that that legislator loses the next election.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
OK put a leash on their teacher's union back in 2001 and since with Right To Work laws, school accountability reforms and other measures. The union has actually lost members as existing members walk away from the union.
Lacking a strong union to dominate the state legislature they've been able to innovate. Otherwise, introducing new curriculum like this would have been precluded by the union because it displaces tenured staff; there are only so many hours of school a day and teaching personal finance takes up time that should be used for gender/race/sexual-orientation sensitivity training, and stuff.
It strikes me that this is Oklahoma's business, and they can do it however they want to.
It is unbelievable to me that this isn't somehow required, at the Federal level. WTF do we have a Department of Education for if stuff like this is missing?
They should teach both sides of the Bitcoin controversy.
Hopefully this will help reduce the divorce rate.
Divorcé's Guide to Marriage - Study Reveals Five Common Themes Underlie Most Divorces
Money was the No. 1 point of conflict in the majority of marriages, good or bad, that Dr. Orbuch studied. And 49% of divorced people from her study said they fought so much over money with their spouse—whether it was different spending styles, lies about spending, one person making more money and trying to control the other—that they anticipate money will be a problem in their next relationship, too.
Many marriages today are 'til debt do us part
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The intent of personal financial literacy education is to inform students how individual choices directly influence occupational goals and future earnings potential. Basic economic concepts of scarcity, choice, opportunity cost, and cost/benefit analysis are interwoven throughout the standards and objectives.
It's a shame that there's no way to force those concepts into the heads of the students who drop out. I suppose you can only help the ones who will be helped; the rest will spend their lives complaining that they're not being helped enough.
Usually an attitude held by those who've not lived there. It's a bit different, but given their population mix, about what you'd expect.
Organization? You must be joking..
Oklahoma's teachers had better use shorter words in their curriculum than their lobbyists used for the press.
Though I also think high schoolers should be required to work a minimum wage job before graduation, for at least a few months. That way, instead of abstract concepts, they know "it feels like this to earn $100.00."
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Of course you can. The ability to communicate, math, the ability to think for yourself... All relevant to students in general - and in many cases pre-requisites for a lot of the personal finance curriculum. That being said, glad to see this is being taught - it's a great addition!
Because even if you have a decent-paying job, you can still make shit decisions and piss it all away very quickly. Look at the large percentage of NFL players who are bankrupt at the end of their careers as a simple illustration of this. This is also true with the vast majority of people who don't earn nearly that amount of money. LIVE WITHIN YOUR MEANS, whatever they may be.
They're busy teaching kids "vote for lower taxes, and you, too, will eventually be rich! As long as you never have health problems. Or disagree with your employer so they fire you."
at giving students enough information to realize just what a raw deal college is for most students.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For example, just the other day I saw an ad that said something like "AAPL! Could you turn one thousand dollars into one hundred thousand dollars almost overnight?"
That's known as a "Pump-And-Dump Scheme" Arguably such an advertisement should be illegal, but this is America!
To teach critical thinking, would be for example to teach schoolchildren not to trust advertising.
The right wing quite forcefully opposes such forms of instruction.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
The DOE has never been about helping students. It's always been a federal organization built to help teachers only.
Which is why shutting it down would make a lot of sense, the communities could come up with sensible standards like teaching financial skills.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Like this couple that pays each other to watch the kids?
http://www.nbcnews.com/busines...
This scares me. We have to realize that textbooks and curriculum are not guaranteed to be written by truly objective and qualified academics, and that not all teachers are qualified to teach personal finance. With those things in mind, do we want our public schools teaching personal finance?
Look at those states fighting evolution, look at those states fighting climate change. Think of all the times in high school that it was obvious the teacher had no real knowledge of the subject matter and was just reading out of a book and relying on pre-prepared material.
In theory, teaching students personal finance would result in financially literate young adults that would avoid the pitfalls of not understanding finance and pass on those positive skills to their children. In practice, theory is never the same as practice.
I'm sure someone will stand up shortly and complain that this is somehow racist, sexist, or otherwise deleterious to the well-being of the pupils being schooled. Can't have kids learning about how money is made, handled, taxed, and invested. That would interfere with them being good little minions who simply do what they're told by their betters...i.e. those in government power.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It's sort of unnecessary. Most high schools have classes in home economics, or straight up business classes that teach skills like making a household budget, managing credit, how to calculate interest for a car loan, etc. Given the sponsors of the OCEE, I have a feeling this is going to be part instructional courses and part corporate propaganda.
I should have mentioned that my father is also at fault, but only in his own way.
Were I to have ever asked him for an allowance, he would have just said "Go ask your mother".
Now in many ways he was a wonderful father. That's how I got accepted to study astronomy at Caltech.
My father taught me to pound nails the very instant I was strong enough to hold his hammer in two hands. I had to wait a long time before he would trust me with his circular power saw. Now I own HIS father's contractor's table saw, I am very good at carpentry so if coding ever doesn't work out I could do construction.
He did that in much the same way as little girls were taught to type, you know, in case their husband ever abandoned them. :-/
Anyway:
"Dad!!! Dad!!! the ice cream man is coming!! Can I buy an ice cream?"
He would just whip out his wallet and hand me a few dollar bills, without counting them, without ever expecting to be paid back.
That was nice at the time, but to this very day I have a problem with binge-purchasing. It is very difficult for me to keep much cash in my wallet for any length of time.
Really what should have happened, is that THE TWO OF THEM should have agreed on some reasonable allowance, then if I wanted an ice cream, I would be expected to pay for it out of my allowance.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
I grew up in Tulsa and graduated from Oklahoma State. It is a backwards, taliban state, for the most part. But even a broken clock...blah blah blah...
The right wing quite forcefully opposes such forms of instruction.
Do you have an example in mind? Or is this the doings of the imaginary right wing?
http://smartertexas.org/?p=368
Then again, why let facts stand in the way of your personal bigotry?
I have grave doubts that this course in finances is not designed to support right wing ideas. There is almost nothing involving finances that is not political or a matter of unproven beliefs. Traditional ideas about business and the work ethic may have already killed us off as the effects are accumulating and no remedy for the growing, negative effects, is at hand. For example we are no where close to eliminating slash and burn deforestation which has the potential to kill all life on Earth. We have no handle at all on causing the population boom to reverse itself. The world's oceans are effectively dead or at least on their death beds. We can not house, feed or provide care and stability for the world's population. All of these woes fall back upon the fact that businesses are at the root of it all. And not one single politician deals with any of this, ever. Business and finances are all about endless growth. Growth itself may be our worst enemy. A catastrophic, world wide, total collapse of the economic system just might be the best thing that could happen to us if it shut down modern businesses and eliminated 90% of the world population. Given that the above is somewhat correct would it not be true that little Johny and Susie should be taught that bankrupticy and no-pay of debts is an ideal state of behavior? Should educated students be taught to maintain,advance, or destroy existing systems? It is all political.
Its about time. I don't recall this being mandatory when I was in school back in the 80's, though I took a basic accounting class as an elective, it was not required. Most of the folks I know who are my age (mid 40's) have at least a basic understanding of these concepts, though the high level of credit card debt shows we're not immune to idiocy.
But I recently had to bang my head against a desk and wonder WTF is wrong with the next generation when a 20 something I know and am "friends" with on Facebook posted about his first paycheck as a full time employee. His comment was along the lines of "The company I work for screwed me over. I worked 40 hours at $10/hr. I made $400 and I only brought home about $275. I should have made about $100 more, I mean taxes are only 6%" (6% is our state sales tax). This was followed by a few dozen posts by his contemporaries who were offering him condolences, telling him to find another employer who wouldn't screw with his money, etc. A few days later he complained about how his bank was screwing him out of money because he had $50 in his account and deposited a check for $250 then used his debit card to make a $100 purchase..... According to him, he should still have $200 and is pissed that his bank screwed him because he now has only $170...... no one ever explained to him that a debit card purchase clears the bank within hours, a day at most while the check he deposited might take up to 3 days to clear and he had overdrafted and been fined $30. Again, none of his contemporaries posted that he was an idiot, the overwhelming number of posts were about how banks screw them all the time saying that they did not have enough money in the bank when they just deposited a check...
Yet another posted about his experience buying a car..... it was $8000, it was a 3 year loan. I forget the exact interest rate but say it was 5%.... He at least understood that 5% meant $400, but had no clue why his payment was going to be higher than $235, no one had ever explained compounding interest to him. We started talking and I explained that when I bought my house I financed 200k @ 3% interest for 30 years. I asked him what he thought my payment was.... He pulled out his phone, openned up the calculator and figured I was only paying about $575/month and said that he should buy a house instead of renting, it would be cheaper...... When I explained the concept of compounding interest, and escrow for taxes and insurance, he was shocked. When I told him that that was actually a decent interest rate and you'd pay more if your FICO score was low, he stared at me blankly and asked "My what score".
These were both high school graduates, both with full time jobs. I know its only anecdotal, but A mutual friend who is my own age and I were talking later and he told me that he didn't bother to respond because he'd had this conversation only a few months earlier with someone else who still didn't get it even after having it explained to them.
Wow.
I took a Macroeconomic and a Microeconomic course in College and having even a basic understanding of Supply&Demand and Opportunity cost has helped me immensely in life, to better understand the motivation of how anything works.
How about a program that provides decent-paying jobs? Wouldn't that do a lot toward ending personal financial crises?
Most such "programs" provide decent-paying jobs by taking away more decent-paying jobs elsewhere, but doing so in a invisible manner (few people see opportunity costs). I suggest market capitalism instead (it doesn't have to be "free market", regulated markets usually work well too) as something that actually works at creating decent-paying jobs.
If you don't have a job, if you can't pay your mortgage or your student loans, must be because you didn't pay attention in your "personal finance" class in high school.
BUT you might not have such large mortgage and student loans with that personal finance class. The more people who have smaller, more manageable problems, the better it is for society as a whole. This isn't about preventing financial mistakes altogether, but about reducing the number of people who are in seriously screwed up financial circumstances and about improving everyone's quality of life.
We used to have civics classes back when I was in school. We learned about the Federal, State, County and City governments, their structure, how you can interact with government, etc. Too many people are so clueless about how it all works they shouldn't even be allowed to vote (although most of them probably don't).
You know, I count myself firmly as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, but one of the strong suits of conservatism as a philosophy is a belief both in the value of self-reliance and self-responsibility, especially in a financial realm. I have no surprise seeing this come from a red state, and I wish more states would embrace such a curriculum.
It's irresponsible that we don't teach kids how to manage money, and it's a good place to get in their heads that math is useful for something, even if they don't like it. We need a society that values saving and long-term rewards over short-term consumption.
We spend too much time thinking of the other side as "the enemy" because of "wrong" beliefs that don't match our own and not enough time looking seriously at their strengths and how we can embrace those as common values -- places where we need to step up our own game in a bipartisan fashion.
So, good for you, Okies. May this be an example for the rest of us.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Was anyone else prepared for something much worse after reading the words "Oklahoma Schools Required to Teach..."?
I saw "Oklahoma" and "required to teach". I thought it was going to be intelligent design.
According to him, he should still have $200 and is pissed that his bank screwed him because he now has only $170...... no one ever explained to him that a debit card purchase clears the bank within hours, a day at most while the check he deposited might take up to 3 days to clear and he had overdrafted and been fined $30. Again, none of his contemporaries posted that he was an idiot, the overwhelming number of posts were about how banks screw them all the time saying that they did not have enough money in the bank when they just deposited a check...
To be fair, that's a legitimate complaint. There's no justifiable reason for that delay nor is there one for not giving a grace period until the end of it before finalizing the overdraft fee. The only reason that historical processing delay is still there is to screw customers out of a fee that wouldn't happen if they put as much emphasis on processing deposits as they did on withdrawals. There's no technical justification for such a difference between the two nor for the lack of forgiveness.
He may be ignorant for not expecting to be screwed in that way, but it is still him getting screwed for no better reason than that it's a revenue stream for the banks.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Dick Cheney was imaginary? Whew, so it really was just a nightmare.
It was several years ago that I read this in the news. I don't recall where I read it, but it was in a dead-tree newspaper.
Given that there is opposition to teaching evolution in some states, and that some state legislature tried to pass a law that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter be exactly equal to three, how is it that you assert that the opposition to critical thinking on the part of the right wing is just my imagination?
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
It's sort of unnecessary. Most high schools have classes in home economics, or straight up business classes that teach skills like making a household budget, managing credit, how to calculate interest for a car loan, etc. Given the sponsors of the OCEE, I have a feeling this is going to be part instructional courses and part corporate propaganda.
Where have you been the past 30 years? Home economics, wood/metal/auto shop, gym/PE, and driver's ed with actual driving training are all but gone. Some dipshits convinced people that those skills wouldn't be necessary anymore, that home ec was offensive, that gym made Bily feel bad for being a fatty, and that training kids to drive on the school parking lot was too much of a liability, so they just let them mow their classmates down at the prom. (Don't worry, they've worked it out so the prom is held after school hours, not on school grounds, and is technically organized by the senior class reps not the school administration, so the school can't get sued.)
Today's high schools have kids discussing feelings more than they have them learning anything useful, and we're shitting out kids who can't cope with reality. This has been going on so long now that those kids are having their own kids come out of the same schools, equally useless. (Hell, they're often still in school when they have their kids.)
Teachers are not perfect and we really shouldn't expect them to be. How qualified were your English teachers in High School? Did they not play a part in your ability to make such a coherent (slight flawed) argument?
Rules to teach your kids:
1. NEVER own a credit card. They serve no purpose and the fact of the matter is, if you use one responsibly (only in emergencies) the credit card company will cancel your card for lack of use after a few months anyway. Trust me, I tried for years to keep one but even with an 800+ credit score they'd cancel it every time.
2. All free financial advice is a scam. MerrillLynch, Morgan Stanley, H&R block, all scams. RUN away. You should have to pay a financial advisor, and they should have to sign a contract stating specifically that they are working in your fiduciary interest. If they will not, they are taking a kickback from the investments they're pushing you towards. The vast majority of all financial advisors are actually salesmen, lying to you, and taking kickbacks from the funds they're investing you in.
3. Life insurance is not an investment. You should only have life insurance if you have a family and in the event of your death they would be unable to pay your outstanding loans on their income... and then you only need insurance for as long as it takes to pay those loans down to the point where either spouse could manage them. In all other cases Life insurance is a scam.
4. Compound interest.Understand what it is, how it effects every aspect of your life. I once had a boss tell me if he paid me what I was asking I'd get small raises in the future because I'd be at the top of my pay grade. But what he failed to mention was that all of those future raises would be based on that original salary! Again, understand how compound interest affects everything in your life. From investments to loans to pay and even schooling.
5. When investing in a retirement plan (like a 401k) stay away from mutual funds if at all possible. If you have to choose a mutual fund (your employer forces you) pick whichever one has the lowest fees. Performance is almost irrelevant if the fund charges you 6%+ in fees. 2% is where you want to be at and if you have the choice to invest in an index you can get your fees under 0.6%. Remember, these fees are on the total value of your investment, not on your earnings. So even when you're losing money they're still taking the fees out!
6. Always invest at least as much in your work 401k as your employer will match. It's free money. If the do not offer a low fee mutual fund or index, you can make the rest of your investments outside of work. That's fine. But that work match is equivalent to making 50% to 100% profit on that money so even if the investment vehicle is terrible, you're still making money.
>To teach critical thinking, would be for example to teach schoolchildren not to trust advertising.
Surprisingly effective. Before I was even school-age when my parents let me watch TV (a rare treat) they made a point of explaining to me how the commercials were trying to manipulate me, often on a case-by-case basis with lots of questions: "What are they trying to sell you?" "Do you think that toy can really do what they're suggesting?" etc. I credit that early education with allowing me to grow up largely impervious to advertising. It probably also contributed to my generally cynical outlook, so some sort of altruistic counterpoint as well would probably be a good thing. My young niece gets regularly subjected to "clutter purge" where she has to divide her toys into "keep", "trash" and "gift" piles, that seems like an idea with some merit. She can get quite excited about thinking of which friends would like a particular gift, or just thinking of how much some mystery child will enjoy the toy she's donating to the salvation army.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I spent 6 looong months in that hell hole.
It is truly America's asshole
Heck, I'm single and I find it incredibly useful to pay *myself* for taking care of unappealing tasks. I keep a separate "luxury" account that all my gadgets, dates, beer, sweets, etc. get purchased from - basically all the "vice" stuff that doesn't directly contribute to my long-term well-being. I then pay into that account for all the stuff I "should" do more often - exercising, mopping the floors, etc. All the usual "earn your allowance" stuff, plus any behavioral modification I wish to inflict.
In practice I've got a daily/weekly/monthly checklist with compensation for every chore fine tuned to get me to actually do the stuff reliably. $0.25 for ten reps of exercise for example - nothing really, but I can easily earn a buck waiting on commercials, and 50-100 reps of mixed exercises scattered throughout the day can make a dramatic difference.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Finance weight has become so important that it has be taught in school.
I cannot wait for other constraints to become so important that instead of managing them, society decide to train children to cope with them: find a cave to sleep, make fire, spare attacks from wild animals, manage a raid from rival tribe...
I just saved you a substantial portion of your lifetime
income, and it didn't cost you a penny to read this.
Of course, the truly wise know that marriage is one of the greatest
con jobs women ever pulled on men, and they don't get married
in the first place.
In other news, why is prostitution illegal in many countries ?
Because women don't like competition.
The teachers of this course pull up this website on the overhead and teach directly from it. There's no deviation from this course material. So if you want to know what they're teaching, feel free to look through it.
http://ok.gov/sde/personal-fin...
Because they really have no choice. You're a fool if you think otherwise.
Ft Sill says go fuck yourself. Did you know that rats think it's pretty goddamned awesome to live in a sewer amongst the shit? I see you don't post very often. Thank the gods you don't. Your bent is clearly ultraconservative redneck asshole so I can totally see why you'd love to live in a place full of ultraconservative redneck assholes.
Don't think that buying lottery tickets is an investment.
He isn't an idiot. He's an IgnorantMotherFucker. It's says it right in his name you dumbass!
Teach 'em to flush the toilets!
studies have shown
Weasel words.
Nice.
Here's your studies you festering pile of trash:
Friedman, Milton. "The 'Plucking Model' of Business Fluctuations Revisited". Economic Inquiry: 171–177.
And:
http://www.webcitation.org/5u40jRL5e
Sportstars who go broke...that's a bit of a different story. The problem there is it's just plain too much money too quickly. I think a lot of us would go broke if we were handed millions of dollars at age 21.
It's an issue of scale and too much, too soon. Imagine you just got MILLIONS of dollars. Try to imagine it. No, really. You can't, really. You have no idea how much money that really is because it's orders of magnitude more than you've ever possessed in your life. But one thing is for certain: it's the money of dreams and to your mind, it's basically infinite. That's the issue of scale.
Think back to your 21 year old self. You just got out of college. Did you REALLY understand how much things cost? Even if you were paying your own way through college, you probably didn't work more than a sustenance job. Your understanding of what rent, cable, electricity, etc. costs were skewed because you were basically just floating along on either loans or parents' money until you graduated. Neither of those teach you much about how fast money goes--because both sources are basically infinite banks where you can always go to get more.
Even worse is if you lived in a dorm. Then it's one bill for everything: heat, water, electricity, rent, TAXES (that's a big one), etc. Everything that costs you money to survive is wrapped up in one neat little number. College athletes on scholarship are forbidden to work and their scholarship will provide for only on-campus housing. That means these guys have had no chance to understand much of anything in regards to personal management--they've never had to! They've been handed money, housing, food, etc. for their entire lives. And then, in one big whoosh, in comes millions and millions of dollars.
A normal person finishes college and gets a job that pays $35-65k, in most circumstances. That's more money than they've seen up to that point, but it's not a fortune and they understand that. Plus, they don't have every scammer in the world trying to get some of their windfall, nor every credit card company personally calling them offering them no-limit AmEx black cards. It's just harder for the average person to get into big trouble quickly because the opportunities aren't there. You get a chance to build yourself up gradually before hitting the big money.
It's a wonder more athletes don't go broke. Combine the sheer lack of experience with a volatile career that could evaporate any day due to a terrible injury and...yeah, it's not a surprise they have financial meltdowns a few years after quitting.
from what I read in the article, it sounds pretty dumb and insulting.
Jesus Christ, do we really need a class to teach kids that there are negative ramifications to overdrawing your checking account? We need to understand WHY people overdraw their checking accounts. People gots no money! People gots no jobs! They need to pay bills! They calculate that $200 in overdraft fees might not be as bad as being evicted for nonpayment of rent. So they suck it up.
These are hard times for the middle class and... working class? (Does that even still exist?) These "financial literacy" initiatives are all about blaming the victims of impossible financial circumstances for their hardships.
Any law that can not be understood ( and is known) to the average high school student should be NULL and void. We have been at this law creating business since mosses. Why can't it get simpler?
The whole idea that ignorance of the law does not excuse one from the law is rubbish. -- Meant to keep lawyers in business.
2K pages of president BO care and 10,000 pages of administration pages is far beyond the number of technical pages I have read.
NULL and VOID
I'll never forgive my mother for making me give away some of my more valued toys. I still have stuff from 50 years ago, and I dearly miss a few cherished things that her religious beliefs caused me to lose.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Anyone capable of teaching this lesson wouldn't choose to be a teacher in Oklahoma.
It's the student who took the loan and owes the interest, so it is welfare to the student. The fact such a loan is unproductive (not creating revenue for the state) and benefits only the banks, is a different matter. Of course the banks are going to shower students with money when it's guaranteed income. Similarly, universities are going to make students the main revenue stream when students can easily borrow more money.
Teenagers need to learn a lot of life skills: Managing savings and expenses, forming social groups and fucking, dealing with the police and legal rights, building work ethics and personal responsibility. None of these are taught in school. (Drugs is a case of 'do what I do', regardless of what is said.)
This is the 'no child left behind' policy. It's a fair, liberal social policy. The problem being one can't pour the same crap down every child's throat and make them shit a passing grade. Some students simply don't have the personality or intellect to handle the school 'workplace'. Most people will be productive employees/students/parents/spouses even if they are mathematically below average. But a small proportion of people will also be the losers and unproductive refugees of a social system.
Actually I have a lucrative C++/Linux contract
The client just tonight said "We want you to own the code".
When I hesitantly asked for permission to do some things that upstream might find offensive, he told me to go to town.
I expect the reason I've been homeless is that I quite prominently link Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear quite prominently at the top of every page of my site - including my seven page resume.
Word seems to have also gotten around that I have very high ethical standards, and so regard my half-dozen or so protest resignation letters as among my very finest written works. One of them is online somewhere but I don't recall the link.
It is true that I am unlikely to figure out how many times I have been in mental hospitals. I really am that crazy at times. However I have only just once been in one for more than a few days at a time. I got three extra months for spending twenty solid minutes quite lucidly explaining to a Court Commissioner who was quite clearly out of her depth when attempting to determine whether the mentally ill should be held involuntarily, that she was a seething idiot.
She started shouting at me. Repeatedly. I mean she totally blew her stack. She then locked me up in Western State Hospital in Lakewood Washington. They wouldn't let me have my Macbook Pro there, so I continued the development of my iOS App by hand, on paper, with a pencil.
I'm old enough to know that there was a time that that was the only way you COULD write software, as keypunch machines and trained keypunch operators were such scarce and expensive resources.
Quite commonly social workers and case managers try to force me onto the disability check, or into government subsidized housing. Always I refuse; despite being mentally ill, I am in reality not in any way disabled.
Look man: half the reason I'm a coder, is that I can still write good coder while I am floridly psychotic! That is G-d's Gospel Truth. The NAZIs used to hold Panzer manuevers in the parking lot of my old office. I'd just shut the blinds, turn out the lights, tell myself I was hallucinating, then continue with my code.
YOUR.
MOVE.
Sigh.
Kids these days...
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
My first two years at Caltech, my total tuition, fees, room, board and books were just ten grand for a top private school.
I transferred to UC Santa Cruz where I later graduated. At that time, tuition, room, board, books and fees came to about three grand.
Fast forward today today. I don't know the actual numbers but my understanding is that UCSC now costs somewhere around fifteen grand. That has a lot to do with the fact that the UC Regents can set their own salaries. The California legislature, government, the UC Students, the courts and what have you, have no control over the UC regent salaries.
There is no damn good reason that Caltech actually needs to charge anyone anything to study there. It has more money in its endowment than G-d Almighty Himself.
Despite that, towards the end of my time there, they announced a collossal tuition increase, so as to be more in line with what other top schools like Stanford were charging at the time.
That never made any sense to any of us, but there it is.
So anyway, my McDonalds manager friend really did put himself through school. He did not qualify for need-based financial aid.
Rather, he attended the local community college for his first two years, which was at the time dirt cheap, then later transferred to UC Berkeley.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
that I cannot meet your demands this very night to provide a citation immeditately, does not mean I am delusional or incorrect.
You might as well have just invoked Godwin's Law.
That's just like appealing to authority, for example "C++ sucks because Richard Stallman prefers C and Java".
Perhaps I should defy you to demonstrate that the Right actually PROMOTES critical thinking instruction in schools.
Give me a fucking break.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
-eritance.
My mother's father committed suicide when she was just seven, in 1948. While he was quite wealthy, being a suicide his life insurance didn't pay out. At they time her family owned a fine mansion. They had to sell it, give away or throw away most of their possessions, then take what they could pack in a truck to my grandmother's childhood home in iowa until they all could recover.
Hence my mother quite adamantly refusing to give me so much as twenty-five cents per week. To expensive you see.
"So mom. I'd like to buy you a good quality turntable with a USB port, so I can digitize grandpa speelmon's collection of monophonic 78 RPM classical records."
"No mike. I'm just going to throw all those records out."
"WHAT? BUT THOSE WERE GRANDA'S RECORDS!"
"They can't possibly be worth anything to anyone. I'm just going to toss them."
"How about giving them to your sister?"
To have any hope of my mother not getting me arrested or committed to a mental instutition, I have had to learn to just let her destroy my inheritance from all of my granparents, as well as my father.
My mother has lots of money, and splits her will evenly between me and my sister, but that's it: the will quite clearly states we each get half.
OK... so who gets what?
My friend Maria has disowned her two sisters, because the two of them snatched up all of their father's possessions when he died.
Similarly with my friend Charles: "We don't actually want to have the dining room table back. We'd just like to eat off it sometimes."
I don't know but I expect granpa speelmon's 78s would be worth maybe fifty grand to a collector. But the money is not the point; I would never sell them, I would do my best to ensure they stayed in our family through successive generations.
"Mom? Do you know where dad's slide collection is?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"Those were just pictures of Europe," she calmly replied.
"JUST PICTURES OF EUROPE?" actually what upsets me most is that I cannot remember what many of my childhood friends even looked like, but I'm sure dad photographed at least some of them.
"You could have sold dad's photos to a stock photography company for ten grand!" Actually more like a couple hundred grand. Dad could have been a national geographic photographer had he but lifted a finger.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
I know lots of people from right-wing families, who got lots of help with their businesses and so are now quite wealthy, quite often through no fault of their own.
I personally feel very strongly that I must succeed on my own merits, so actually for most of my career I've been self-employed. But I never got any real help from anyone other than, if I'm really lucky, the occasional helpful advice.
I learned the very, very hard way that accountants and attorneys are a compete waste of my valuable time. They are willing to give me real bad advice in return for an hour of their fees, but they only give good advice to those with deep pockets.
Consider say Ronald Reagan. He was very poor when he was a child, but quite wealthy as an adult. But then as adult, he did everything in his power, to enable the already rich, to get even richer, while at the same time knocking down the poor people. For example one of his very first acts as president was to deny food stamps to college students.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
marijuana is completely legal and grows wild all over creation?
While Albert Hoffman had yet to discover it in 1776, LSD was perfectly legal from his discovery during world war II until 1965.
Now we find that the conservatives work vigorously to prevent the cultivation of industrial hemp. I'm not talking about The Evil Weed. I'm talking about the plant that you make the kind of paper out of, that you write declarations of independence on. Hemp paper lasts forever, and is a lot cheaper and better for the environment than paper made from wood.
This despite that most other countries actually encourage hemp cultivation. It won't be long at all before the american paper industry collapses, because we won't be able to compete with Canadian hemp paper.
Women should not be permitted to wear pants?
Mentally ill people are burned at the stake as witches?
c'mon, help me out here I'm begging you!
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
Austrian school economics have been well-vetted and backed up by decades of economic study. Austrian School has nothing to do with politics, libertarianism, or big/small government.
The main postulate of the Austrian School is that individual subjective choices are the root of all economic phenomena, which is absolutely true. As goes the herd, so does the economy. In fact mainstream economics is underpinned by many Austrian theories.
I think you are confusing the veracity of Austrian theory with the fact that it begins to fall out of favor as more and more of the economy is forcibly taken away from the individual by government. For example, in 2013, government spending accounted for 6.9T of the approximately 15T economy. In this case, nearly half of the economy is not contributed to the individual, but rather to the ruling class.
Basically, Austrian economics depends on having a free society, and not a collective. The United States is probably about half and half, with a rising conflict between the economic decisions of the ruling class, and the economic decisions of the individual.
You should probably study the subject in a little more depth before spouting off at the mouth about things you clearly don't know anything about.
that I cannot meet your demands this very night to provide a citation
No, I asked for evidence not a citation. The two aren't the same. Even if they were beautifully cited, the two examples you gave earlier would not be evidence of the claim that some group of people identifiable as "right-wing" "quite forcefully opposes such forms of instruction".
Perhaps I should defy you to demonstrate that the Right actually PROMOTES critical thinking instruction in schools.
Such as in Catholic schools? They are far from ideology-free (as a number of Slashdotters have complained about over the years), but they do teach a lot of the tools for critical thinking (as those same Slashdotters often demonstrate).
Also, this is a fallacy since we were discussing the different claim that some group was "forcibly opposing" critical thinking.
While I'm glad someone is teaching these kids about personal finance, I feel like this is yet another subject that should be taught by parents. I took an elementary economics class in high school that also taught us how to make a budget and even balance a checkbook. However, I had learned these things several years earlier. I know nowadays more than half of Americans are in massive debt so perhaps parents wouldn't set the best example for their kids. Just makes me sad that this sort of thing is even needed.
I just got my hands on a leaked copy of the cirriculum, and I'm posting it here in its entirety:
Chapter 1: In The Beginning
God did it.
Chapter 2: Your Responsibilities
God did it.
Chapter 3: Your Future
God did it.
Please pick up your State of Oklahoma diploma on your way out into the real world.
Damn. I bet you're a lot of fun on dates.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Eh, it's not much different than the common advice to set aside 10% of your paycheck for "fun" - I just make myself jump through a few extra hoops on the way.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Who didn't have to take home economics in High School? I had to balance a checkbook and calculate living expenses to graduate as well. It is nice to see they are adding upon the existing instruction material with identity theft and so on, but this isn't anything new.
With all the credit card debt and the recent past history of taking out multiple mortgages on homes to finance vacations, kids apparently can't learn these skills at home. On the other hand, schools are always looking for taxpayer bailouts, so I'm not sure they are experts at personal finance, either. But, it is a noble idea to teach this country how to balance a budget. Skepticism about free lunches promised by politicians should be included along with the other types of fraud to beware of.
where the fuck is the "parent" link? How the fuck am I supposed to navigate comments without that?
and why the fuck would I be forced to type in a new subject? I'm replying to a message. Just default to the same subject, obviously!
And why the fuck is it stripping out my formatting? TWO LINES BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS the entire internet has worked that way since 1992!
BETA SUCKS
If Slashdot rolls out Beta for everyone all the time, I pledge to stop coming here forever.
Contrary to any prevailing thought, I forgot my password...anyway...a coin is reigning over your heads tempting you to follow a set of changing ethical laws based on business and corporate laws. That's what you call a religion, based on economics and your ability to fulfill your desired steps up the economical ladder's rungs for your personal appraisal as a human being. Newborn children are already prophesied economic doom.A woman is never free to say two words,"I Do" in a marriage ceremony.
Normal humans are disappearing...your esteem is based on your appraisal and economic standing among everyone else... from rich to poor. Great environemt to find crime and mental illness as a financial bonanza.Everyone needs protection from everyone else...a very chaotic situation, provided by the clandestine branch of the IRS called the FBI that keeps a good record as your eulogy.
The rich are suddenly more empowered than any newborn child is to be healthy and wise.
He may be ignorant for not expecting to be screwed in that way, but it is still him getting screwed for no better reason than that it's a revenue stream for the banks.
...and sadly, this is probably something that a personal finance class will never teach, despite it being incredibly relevant to everyone's personal finances. There's simply too much that can be taught about the subject while missing everything that young adults will actually need to know. These kids will probably be taught how to balance a checkbook and how to calculate loan interest, but they likely won't be taught that loans are often a bad idea, and they'll never be taught that their banks are secretly out to screw them over.
What most people need to know isn't how to balance a checkbook -- people tend to figure that out easily enough on their own. What people need to know is how to avoid getting financially fucked by the world. They need to know that their bank will delay their deposits in order to cause them to overdraw their account so that they can charge them fees. They need to learn about "predatory lending" so that they don't become a victim of it. The really unfortunate thing about the way loans were presented to me in school was that the interest was always nothing more than a price tag for the loan and it was just a matter of whether you felt like paying that much for the convenience of getting the money, and never a matter of whether it made more sense to pay for the loan or to do without the loan. Occasionally there was a comparison between the costs of two loans, never a comparison between the cost of a loan vs. no loan, especially nothing complex like whether to get a loan for a used car vs. continuing the constant repairs to your existing piece of shit. Indeed, economic lessons in school often suffer from all of the examples being from the perspective of someone who isn't poor as shit.
The examples are also just plain simplified. I got screwed over by CitiFinancial in ways that had never been taught to me in school. I'd never heard about loan fees and so I didn't know to ask about them. They offered me insurance and it didn't occur to me that it might not be a competitive rate, nor did it occur to me that they'd bill be for three years of it in advance just so that they could charge me interest on the amount. (Being older and wiser, I now know that there's essentially no way their insurance would be the best rate on the market, and so I could safely just refuse it without even considering it.) I went to them to avoid the high APR for a cash advance on my credit card, it didn't occur to me that their APR might even be higher. I just sat across from someone who typed numbers into a computer and said "well, if we do 2 years, the monthly payment will be this much, or if we do 3 years the monthly payment will be this much" and, hell, the only reason anyone looked at interest rates in school was to compare loan offers, and this was the only place willing to offer me a loan, so I saw no point in asking since I'd been taught in school that bank interest rates are better than credit card interest rates. Turns out the interest rate was 25%, far higher than my credit card's cash advance rate, indeed it's the maximum rate allowed by law. There was also a $100 "loan fee" and some terrible amount added to pay for the three years of insurance up-front. I got the loan to cover $1650 for a used car, went in six months later after paying $127 a month to ask what it would cost to pay off the loan, and was told it would cost $2100. It wasn't until then that I realized the degree to which I'd been fucked. While those examples in school included APR rates, they never mentioned any of that other bullshit. Hell, they never mentioned insane shit like 25% APRs either, otherwise I damn well would have asked.
So it seems it didn't do me much good to learn how to calculate interest rates in school, but learning the many ways in which companies might try to screw me over, that would have done
I hope they teach about compound interest in the Savings and Interest portion of that class.
When I saw the word scarcity, warning bells went off. Too often people are told something is scarce when it is not. Simply because scarcity is used to drive up prices without reason throughout history. Enron among others comes to mind.
With economics, I hope they emphasize the supply side! Trickle down emphasized demand and we are living that wet dream now...its what devastated the supply side by destroying the middle class that purchased our goods and services in greater quantities than a few wealthy individuals. Good paying (living wages) jobs that increase the number of consumers is exactly what will solve this problem. I am sure I am not alone at being sick of this race to the bottom that right to work for less has created throughout the nation. As Greece, Turkey and Europe have taught us, austerity does not work, so why are the majority of our politicians going along with the banks and pushing us there?
Bet they will not teach that to the kids! At least teach them the power of compounding and the economic sense of securing a job with a living wage so you have a chance at investing, saving and reaching your goals. At least that.
Some people learning about this may think they are now experts on these topics and fall for all sorts of scams.
This is the first sensible change to a US school system that I've read about in years ... maybe even EVER!
Now they need to find a way to FORCE adults to learn the basics as well!