Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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").
Consider what they may not be teaching in order to cover topics that are
state-specific: bankruptcy, the financial impact of gambling and charitable giving
The school year and the material that can be covered in it is finite. If you add hefty new requirements, something else will have to be dropped. Maybe they can trim out all the "controversial" science.
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?
We covered a lot of those topics in our "Problems of Democracy" class even back in the '70s
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
As an Oklahoma resident since 1990, I can guarantee you (with high levels of confidence) that it will be politically slanted to the Republican side.(I'll leave the 'good vs. bad' argument alone)
And from my experience and observation, Amy Lee's statement: 'Oklahoma has some of the strongest standards in the country,' does not mean anything regarding the actual quality of OK's public education system.
What her statement means to me is that her criteria is: "How many boxes can we check? More is better, right?"
Our decision to pull our daughter(my stepdaughter) out of the school system and use 'homeschooling' was well worth the red tape for the difference in education.
For those parents that can do so, I highly recommend the 'homeschooling' experience.
But, be forewarned: it requires a good bit of effort and dedication, and may not always be the best option.
The social interaction, and diversity of ideas that come with 'going to school' do not happen, or are diminished with 'homeschooling'.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
That's where you come in ...
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
This is terrible advice. Using a credit card responsibly doesn't mean "only for emergencies," it means "only for expenditures you would have otherwise, and COULD HAVE OTHERWISE, paid for with cash." Pay your bill on time, you pay zero interest, and get cash back.
>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.
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.
Good advices!
1. I'd say it's possible to get ahead using a credit card, but you need to be very disciplined. The agreements are very much structured as a deal with the devil, as soon as you get behind one payment they start charging you as many fees and interest charges as they can. That said, you can win by:
Getting a card with 0% APR, and paying off the balance in full each month.
ALWAYS paying your balance off in full every month before the due date. Do not carry a balance, since this means they start charging you fees.
If you miss a payment, you LOSE. Minimize damage by paying off your entire balance completely (including stuff that hasn't hit your statement yet) and stop using the card until they stop charging you fees and you return in good standing. This may take 2-3 billing cycles. They will continue to charge you fees for several months, along with interest based on your "average daily balance" (i.e. not the balance of $0 if you pay it off before your statement date comes around). If it's your first time paying late, MAYBE you can give them a phone call and have all the fees waived once.
Set up automatic payments from your savings/checking account, so you never miss a payment
Make sure you always maintain enough money in your savings/checking account so you can completely pay off all the balances on all your credit cards and still have enough to live for 3-6 months. This probably takes the most discipline, since it means you probably want to live on a strict budget until you hit that number.
Profit! Pay your credit card statements as late as possible, but no later (I usually schedule them about a week before the due date). If done right, you essentially end up floating the money you spend with your credit cards for 1-2 months... meaning the money you spend will stay in your bank account (earning interest, however meager it is these days). And if you have good credit score, you can probably get some percentage rewards on your credit card purchases (1% - 5% is common).
Share the wealth - of course, cashback from the credit card essentially means the merchants you frequent are paying you a percentage whenever they run your credit card (or, er, the credit card company is giving you a small cut of what they charge the merchant for transactions). So if there's a merchant or restaurant you like, consider paying cash, especially when tipping waitstaff (who might then be able to go on and, er, underreport their tips to reduce their tax burden, which is illegal but I'm sure it happens and doesn't really have anything to do with you other than they will love you for it).
2. Yes! Don't be afraid to be your own accountant, tax forms are all written towards an 8th grade comprehension level (ha ha). But really, tax incentives are there to help shape your behavior and a lot of it is actually very level-headed for something that comes out of government - there are little rewards you can score at the end of the year for improving your energy efficiency, supporting good charities (more money donated to stuff you actually want to support means slightly less tax dollars for congress to throw at things you don't like). But by all means use an online service like taxact or turbotax to take the liability off of you if there's an honest mistake that slips through.
3. Yeah, life insurance doesn't work the same way it does in the Game of Life for some reason. Usually if you can snag some from your employer for little to no contribution, that's worthwhile to make sure your family has enough money to bury you if you die, and keep the house and family car running until they can cozy up with another breadwinnar.
4. Compound interest might be the only useful financial advice you can get out of a high school education these days. But they still don't really give you a lot of rules of thumb that fall out of that, such as:
Inflation means everyone's money depreciates about 3% each year. If your bank account's interest rate is less than tha
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...
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...
Disagree with your first point, though the rest are good.
Credit cards, if paid off in full every month, are a great way to build your credit score and can also offer "rewards" amounting to a couple percent discount on your purchases (which comes in the form of higher prices to cover CC fees, but most places charge the same whether you pay with credit or cash). They are also a really convenient way to handle disputes with merchants. Oh, and your bank(s) suck(s); I only carry one card (so it gets used regularly) but my parents each have a "backup" card that may not get pulled out for years yet still works when the do (typically done in case there's a block for something like suspected fraud on their other card).
My CC has a far higher limit than my debit card (which I carry pretty much just for ATMs), was virtually the only reason I *had* a credit score before buying my car, works all over the world without requiring me to get local cash (I travel a lot), means I don't have to carry much cash so I'd lose very little if I got mugged / pickpocketed, and has no service fees. It's a pretty great deal. The balance on it rarely breaks 1000 (usually only when I made a huge purchase that month) even though I put practically everything except rent on it (I'd use it for rent too, if I could). It automatically pays out of my checking account each month, with much of the remainder being moved into savings. Every month or so I check it for unexpected expenses, which takes just a couple minutes online. The only thing I've ever found was some stupid bank-related charge I got canceled (I don't need whatever-the-hell-it-is protection, thanks!)
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You didn't get to item 2: "All free financial advice is a scam." At that point Charliemopps has advised us to pay no attention what he just wrote. ;-)
Suggested clarification: Someone presenting themselves with the title "Financial Adviser", who meets with you in person without you paying them (e.g., front-load mutual fund company agents), is a scam.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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.
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
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.
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.
This would create another perverse incentive to dumb down education- as much as the complexity of current law is bad, the inability to pass laws preventing any bad behavior that requires some knowledge (i.e. limits on pollution levels) would allow tragedy of the commons abuses by the powerful to be much worse.
Another approach that might achieve the benefits you seek would be to require that every piece of legislation must be read allowed in its entirety before being voted on- and that any congress-critter who is at any point outside the room during the reading is considered to have voted "no".
One could still write something that was confusing- but at least it would be short enough enough to be read between bathroom breaks.
The issue with life insurance is that there are two vastly different types. Term insurance is where there is a very large payout in the event of death with a very small regular premium payment, but the insurance is only good for a short specified time frame and the premiums rise as the insured infividual ages.
I can't recall the name for the other type but it typically has much smaller values but is actually an investment, normally with a gaurunteed minimum interest rate. My parents took out such a policy for me as an infant, the value of which was their guess at what burial and funerary expenses would be if I died early. If I chose to cash out the policy now it would probably be worth two or three times as much as the intended original value.
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.
Pay your bill on time, you pay zero interest, and get cash back.
The "cash back" you get is just a slice of the merchant's fee that makes prices go up for everyone, credit card users and non-users alike. This is why the company is willing to do business with you in the first place despite paying off your balances: you're still giving them a cut of everything you buy.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Very true, but so what? The price of the product is $10. If I pay cash, it costs me $10. If I pay with a credit card, it costs me $9.80.
I suppose, in theory, if everyone stopped using credit cards, prices might come down somewhat, but I really doubt they'd come down enough to completely offset the benefit I get for paying with a credit card - a bit portion of the savings would be captured by the merchant.
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.
You missed the credit rating part. Having a good credit rating will help you a lot in life, and the way to get a good credit rating is to borrow money and pay it back on time. If you use a credit card and pay it off each month, you're getting a short float on your money and building up a good credit rating, and you're not paying any interest. In my limited experience, the trick is to realize that you're paying for things when you use the card, as opposed to thinking that you're putting it on plastic instead of paying.
Note: This advice is guaranteed only in the US. If it doesn't work for you, you can have a refund of everything you paid me for it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
But not 100% of it. When I get cash back on a credit card, I pay for some if it with higher prices. I'm grateful to people like Charliemopps for paying for the rest of it.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"