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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

I think every high school student should have one day class dedicated on following topics and so many lives would be saved:

1. Folies of investments, how you can lose everything.

2. Folies of marriages, divorce laws and how you can lose everything.

3. Folies of gambling in casinos and how you can lose everything.

4. Folies of alcohol, tobacco and other soft drugs and how you can lose everything.

Each of these class should be given by 2-3 people who actually lose everything in these cases.

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Also some exercises on how everything that sounds too good to be true is a scam.

They already teach math...

Ideally, it would be great for a country to have systems in place so that the worst you can possibly lose is less than everything.

how would you make it so that i cant bet all my money

Technically I think there are lots of such laws. Like protecting the house you live in.

But in the case of things like taxes and child support, you can ultimately lose a lot more than everything.

That would definitely fuck up the housing market for starters.

More generally statistics/probabilities and critical thinking.

I taught my children all of these. Except 2), as they are girls:)

You're doing them a grave disservice, then. If you're a woman who managed to build up savings beforehand, or was trusting enough to be the main earner while your husband was going through school, you can end up the worse off financially for making a poor marriage decision.

And don't forget to mention all the women who accept diminished lifetime earnings because they were the primary caregivers for the couple's children, and then find themselves struggling to support those kids and themselves if their husbands leave, no matter what child support was awarded on paper. Even if the father does come through on the court-ordered payments, she's never going to get that decade of her career back, or the retirement savings she missed out on.

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