Georgia to mandate personal finance education | Hacker News Reader

Georgia to mandate personal finance education

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216 pointslxm150 comments

Some things they ought to cover:

1. what colleges cost, what salaries various majors get, and how that works with tuition loans

2. what the terms profit, loss, revenue, equity, assets and liability mean. What a balance sheet is, what a profit & loss statement is

3. how markets work

4. how compound interest works

A bonus would be how fractional reserve banks work

I would add:

Tax treatment of different forms of income

What are capital gains? What does it mean for them to be realized vs unrealized?

This is way beyond what a high schooler needs for getting started in life.

This is personal finance, for all, not professional accounting for optimizing cash flows. it's far moren important to learn the basics of not getting robbed by predatory businesses, so that they can have a chance at saving some money to turn into capital gains later.

Because I guess outlawing predatory business practices is out of the question

I remember back in 2008 people were complaining that they didn't know they had to pay back those mortgages. They also complained they didn't know what their mortgage contract said, because they didn't read it.

Every mortgage contract I've bought included a separate page that said simply "I have read and understand this contract" that had to be signed.

At what point does some personal responsibility come into play?

>This is way beyond what a high schooler needs for getting started in life.

Yes, but high school is your last chance to get it into everyone's heads.

Perhaps also:

That federal income tax in the US is levied in a progressive fashion; for example, to be taxed at the top income bracket at 37% as a single filer in 2022 meant that any money made OVER the amount over $523,600 is taxed at 37%.

Too many people I know think that all of their money is taxed at a flat XX% based solely on the highest income tax bracket they are in. This is simply not the case at all.

And in that topic, also that getting a tax refund or having to pay doesn't change anything about the amount of taxes you ended up paying that year. And how getting a big refund isn't a windfall, it's just bad planning.

Indeed. Actually the opposite of a windfall. You've given the government an interest free loan for up to a year. I try to do minimal withholding and pay my taxes as late as possible.

That’s on purpose. The people who quack loudly about taxes prey on the ignorant.

The estate tax is the most egregious example.

Tax brackets / progressive taxation in general.

The "don't take a raise, you'll actually make less" factoid is way too common.

Union and trade job wages without needing college.

5. What is cryptocurrency

6. Do not fall for crypto scams

the fundamental problem with cryptocurrency is that it requires being your bank and all that entails for IT security, or else you need to rely on a thrid party and there defeats the purpose and meaning of it being cryptocurrency.

It's impossible for a layperson to use crypticut effectively without becoming an expert, so the only broad education you can give is "stay away, as with day-trading stocks, and options, and any fast money schemes".

Ponzi schemes, MLMs, a whole set in the “if it’s too good to be true” bucket

I learned about Ponzi schemes in US government in middle school in VA in about 2000.

A unit explaining some common financial scams, and how to recognize and avoid them, would be excellent to include.

For example: Check cashing scams are extremely common, and can be financially ruinous. Many of these scams could be avoided if students knew that checks take time to clear, and were warned to be extremely suspicious of requests to spend or give away money from a check that might not have cleared.

Honestly this is the bank's fault. The bank should not give money for the check unless everything is alright. Or if it gives money, it should also give a warning or something. You can't expect customers to know all the quirks.

I think checks made a lot more sense to people when no consumer transactions were electronic, and cash was the only instant transfer people dealt with.

Bad checks were an easy concept to understand when everyone was carrying around a handwritten checkbook register

How debt works, including how to "do the math" without fancy formulas.

Where my kids went to high school, one of the teachers always assigned a term paper on the payday loan industry. I think it was a subtle form of personal finance education.

The personal finance lessons I learned as a kid were way more basic than that.

When I was in, I think, 6th grade, could have been 7th, my mom gave what to me at the time was a huge allowance. I had been getting a few dollars a week, she sat me down and told me she was going to give me what in today's money would be around $200 a month, from what I remember. Sounds way high, but I think that is what it was.

The catch was that it had to cover everything. School lunches, school supplies, clothes, bus fare, music, books, video games, movies, anything I wanted to buy, that was it. I couldn't come to her for more money if I ran out.

That taught me, in a slightly brutal way, the following two personal finance lessons:

1: If you spend your money on this, you won't have money to spend on that.

2: If you spend your money now, you won't have money to spend later.

Which of course sounds trivial and most people would say that they know these things, but many people don't act like they know these things.

I would assume she was trying to teach me a lesson, but if she was it was a case of "those who can't do, teach". When she kicked me out of the house for the last time, she said she wasn't too worried about me since I had more money in my checking account than she did.

RIP my mother the economist.

Thank you for sharing, I'm going to speak to my wife about this for our son. Cheers.

> Which of course sounds trivial and most people would say that they know these things, but many people don't act like they know these things.

And the cousin of those two - "if you spend more than you earn, you will be broke".

Managing personal finances really illustrates the gap between knowing something and acting on knowledge. The gap is vast.

As for your first one, add just get a 3.0 and go to a public college in state and take advantage of the Hope scholarship.

That seems a bit out of touch for a universal education program. I'd start with interest rates, consumer credit, mortgages, filing taxes, self-employment, retirement accounts and how to avoid scams.

I got the impression that the fractional reserve banking comment was tongue in cheek, as in "...so that they don't end up believing in money too much".

> 1. what colleges cost, what salaries various majors get, and how that works with tuition loans

This should also be part of the student loan approval process.

It's interesting you describe it as "fractional reserve banks" given the fractional reserve bit has been largely irrelevant for a good while now (and in many countries, flat out wrong). For sure though, it would be super useful if everyone knew how banks work.

How do you mean? Why do you say the fractional reserve bit is irrelevant?

I mean reserves don't actually constrain lending: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/04/02/ptolemaic-econ...

Edit, also: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/03/29/krugman-on-or-...

> Why do you say the fractional reserve bit is irrelevant?

Fractional banking hasn't been a thing for decades. Tobin called re-loaning deposits the "Old View" in 1963:

* https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d01/d0...

Some countries haven't had reserve requirements for over thirty years:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement#Canada

Roche has a good paper on the modern monetary system:

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625

See also the Bank of England:

* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

Man, i think they'd want stuff like: How to create a budget. What does a 401k do for you. How to plan for retirement. How to do your taxes. Balancing a checkbook. Psychology of debt versus paying in cash. How to save money. Nutrition planning under constraints - feeding yourself or your family cost effectively without eating garbage food or wasting money.

Don't get me wrong, intermediate economics topics are useful and valuable, but I think people are overestimating the level of basic knowledge young people have by a huge margin. It might be good to culminate in a crash course in investment banking and hedge fund management, but let's make sure we have a rock solid foundation of practical personal economics that empowers people to take advantage of any level of income, even chintzy $9/hr teenage summer jobs.

Also, workers rights and financial security of identity - cover basic workers rights, unionization rules, benefits, drawbacks, when you need a lawyer, where to report employer misconduct, small claims court, identity security and credit bureaus, credit freezes, and so on.

Fractional reserve isn't how banking works: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/12/20/Mon...

Here are a few sample curricula used for these kinds of classes in other states, to give an idea of what's commonly taught:

TX: https://www.dallasfed.org/educate/pfl.aspx

MS (PDF): https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed...

VA (PDF): https://p19cdn4static.sharpschool.com/UserFiles/Servers/Serv...

Following your links, I'm seeing topics like "differentiate between needs and wants" and "what are taxes for." Perhaps these classes are helpful to those with a room-temperature IQ, but I think that for college-bound students, they're a waste of time.

My High School took the approach of automatically signing everyone up for a personal finance class, but letting anyone take something else if they talked to their counselor. That way students who cared about learning actual academic subjects could do so, but those who were most likely to need a class in personal finance were still sorted into it by default.

Lists of competencies sometimes sound silly if you read them like a table of contents. But they’re not chapter titles or a lesson plan, they’re just lists of what shouldn’t be overlooked. Some of them might just be part of a broader discussion about something else.

Another way to look at it is: if someone can’t do those things, they are not competent in the subject matter.

I think you answered your own question with your anecdote. PF class is indeed targeted.

In the same way that health class teaches abstinence but all the cool kids know to party, I predict that personal finance class will teach savings and index funds while all the cool kids know to bet it all on GME.

https://youtu.be/d80ahvRSV8E

The class will need to teach kids to maximize the geometric mean of returns, not arithmetic mean, so they know how to properly size their GME calls.

A practice account for the purpose of teaching youngsters about the stock market would be great, actually.

You'd either develop a healthy respect for the volatility of equities, or alternatively the irrationality of the whole system.

Would love to see an entire student body lose their collective imaginary savings betting on GME

I grew up in Georgia, and in one class in middle school we played "the stock market game".

I didn't care about it. So my 'group', me and two girls who spoke little English, just put our pretend funds in some diversified blue chips, and then every time the class took time to rebalance their funds, I just read, leaving them where they were because I didn't care.

My group got first in the school and got pizza with the ones who got second and third.

I mean, that sounds like a perfectly sound strategy. It's the whole concept behind the couch potato investment strategy.

Oh, 100%. I'm not sure exactly what it was trying to teach other than "investing is better than savings" (though given it was just over a semester it could have proven a very different lesson), but it definitely influenced my own passive "throw it in an index fund and forget about it" retirement savings.

I'm surprised that was a winning strategy. Many of the students in my class dumped everything into penny stocks. Sure, most of them lost their virtual shirts, but my safe investments didn't have the slightest chance of winning against that volatility. If twenty people spin the roulette wheel a few times, one of them is probably going to beat the safe option.

It took a while for me to understand where I went wrong. Ultimately, my conclusion was that a short winner-take-all contest rewards very different strategies than the actual market does.

One of my high school electives included the stock market game. At the time my father had some inside info about several tech stocks that were about to do very nice things for one's portfolio, if one somehow had that inside info. So while everyone else was either just playing around, or spending a lot of time researching, I quietly bid my time. My portfolio ended up being worth more than the next 5 people combined.

The only lesson I learned from that is that insider trading is where the profits are at.

I don't think anyone in my class was interested in playing a numbers game and being more likely to lose individually against someone playing conservatively. Maybe there's a game theory thing that says you ought to if you know everyone else is playing conservatively, but I don't know that people were broadcasting their strategies, either; I just know that when we had periods for people to redistribute their investments, groups huddled and chatted, and made updates on their sheets, and I just read.

We had a stock market club in school that had competitions built around stocks and investing. It was a lot of fun.

Abstinance classes were a joke 20 years ago and they are still made fun of by today's kids. Unless you lock them in their room from 14-18, you're gonna have a bad time if you expect abstinence.

Teaching personal finance is challenging for at least two reasons - (1) budgets take focus over time and (2) the $$ experience of a high schooler is wildly disconnected from the reality of adulthood.

I’m working on a site called MoneyHabitsHQ.com. I’m super excited to build a system which allows kids to use the same budgeting tools their parents use, and develop more autonomy over time. The goal is to equip parents/guardians to walk with the kids over several years as they develop habits around money.

Many years ago had a civics teacher who got a free instructional package from the IRS on how to fill out taxes. It was one of the most useful things we were taught that year. Also reminds me of practical skills I learned in a shop class. Basic electrical, plumbing, carpentry, masonry, welding, power tool use, and small engine repair. All things that helped me live independently as an adult.

>who got a free instructional package from the IRS on how to fill out taxes

The IRS used to mail this to every household who sent them a paper form last year.

Apparently HN readers are unaware that personal finance courses like this are useless. There has been decades of research showing unequivocally that they don't work.

Virtually no current financial education researcher thinks they accomplish anything.

The problem is they, like all education, doesn't stick unless it is immediately and repeatedly put into practice. High schoolers are simply the wrong audience for this.

This is a feel good measure, nothing more.

Current state of the art favors just in time education on specific topics as they arise.

Can you cite some sources behind the assertion that personal finance courses are useless for high school students?

It’s difficult to imagine that 12th graders, who are functional adults and often already employed, would not benefit from an understanding of debt, compound interest, mortgages, IRA’s and other tax-deferred savings plans, and stock markets.

They aren’t going to care about most of the things on that list because they won’t be getting a mortgage or investing for a while. It’ll go in one ear and right out the other.

Debt and compound interest can be taught in one class period.

> Debt and compound interest can be taught in one class period.

to people who already understand exponential growth...

College loans aren't that far from mortgages, and plenty of students will make money one way or the other during college that can be invested.

"In a recent meta-analysis of over 200 prior studies on financial literacy programs, conducted by Daniel Fernandes, John Lynch, and Richard Netemeyer, and entitled “Financial Literacy, Financial Education, and Downstream Financial Behaviors”, the researchers found that interventions to improve financial literacy explain a statistically significant but practically irrelevant 0.1% of subsequent financial behaviors."

The problem is knowledge decay. If you don't use it immediately you forget it. Just like every other academic subject.

12th graders also don't remember their geometry or algebra or history classes.

Many high schoolers have part time jobs.

We should add ethics and philosophy to that. It's far past time for grade school to stop being about "teach the sheep the bare minimum to turn them into dumb, compliant factory workers."

Whose ethics and whose philosophy? Can we teach the Bible? The Quran? Confucius?

That's a good question. Perhaps a smattering of some kind? I think even if it's not a specific set of ethics, even merely teaching that the concept exists is a start.

Certainly all of those three are terrible choices if your goal is to produce a less compliant populace that is healthily critical of authority.

Why would a less compliant population be healthy? It seems like the opposite is true.

To clarify: that was an adverb to 'critical of authority'. In the sense I meant it, it means a population that is prepared to challenge authority but does so based on reason and good information.

Covering a variety of ethical frameworks is generally a good strategy to teach ethics

That's way too ambitious.

If it's anything like any PHIL 100 course, it'll just be an endless cycle of Cultural Relativism --> Act Utilitarianism --> Hitler --> Rule Utilitarianism --> Cultural Relativism..., ad infinitum

I quite enjoyed being warned against reading Nietzsche at Harvard.

Philosophy is the penultimate science, but as a pedagogic discipline it’s practically hopeless nowadays.

Yeah, do it!

There is a lot of good scholarship on those topics, and a lot of good resources that are accessible to people who have not yet learned scholarships which is also ideal.

Just drop the part where you say "can we teach the bible [etc]", because that makes it sound like you're referring to teaching the practice of a religion which has nothing to do with teaching ethics or philosophy.

All three, plus samples from other world traditions. Personally I think Marcus Aurelius, The Bhagavad Gita, and Homer would be excellent resources for high school kids.

Funny how being a dumb compliant factor worker has a better chance at making a living than someone with a philosophy degree.

Or you can double major computer science and philosophy like I did

One of those will help career wise and the other aids in that. A good pair

A guess. I would guess chances are that someone with a philosophy degree has more options to begin with, and would more likely go lateral into some white collar office job than become destitute.

True, will they directly use a degree in philosophy though? The path to a white collar job is much shorter with other degrees.

I don't think it does; there are no factory jobs. These days for a good career you need a more nuanced understanding of the world.

But.. there are. I’m not saying working in a factory is a glorious, all-fulfilling career but it’s work. The best thing the American educational system could do is teach trades rather than leave young adults in tens of thousands to hundred thousands in debt to begin their adult life. Having a “nuanced” understanding of the world will do little to change that.

I found the YNAB videos and classes to be absolutely invaluable. Although actually I can attach an exact dollar value to them, lol. Wish I learnt that at or before 18 instead.

I think financial literacy is a good idea for high school students but an entire semester seems like overkill.

Everything one needs to know could probably be a one week course or two weeks tops.

The downside is that high school already is very little room for electives so now that’s a semester less of whatever students would like.

I think you underestimate the amount of time that it takes to convey information in a high school classroom. For example, four years of language instruction at the high school level, assuming that the student manages to pass the AP exam at the end of it, gives that student the equivalent of two semesters of language instruction at the college level. A one-year math class in high school (with roughly 180 classroom days) is taught in colleges in a single semester (with 45 classroom days). Part of this is that there will be a lot of hands-on in-class experience as part of the instruction.

Illinois requires 9 weeks of consumer education which is usually made part of another class although the local high school's requirement is either a semester-long class or AP Economics.

Keep in mind also that that's because in high school the number of hours per week are far more limited.

High school has a part of a highly varied curriculum.

For example, students almost never spend more than 25% of their time on just math. Whilst in university, a single paper involves spending 25% of your time on a single sub topic like geometry.

>Keep in mind also that that's because in high school the number of hours per week are far more limited.

I don’t understand what you’re claiming here. At least in terms of classroom contact time, the number of hours is much higher in high school (typically five 50 minute periods per week vs. three 50 minute periods per week in college) and the school year is longer (20–21 weeks per semester vs 15 in college).

> A one-year math class in high school (with roughly 180 classroom days) is taught in colleges in a single semester

That's forgiving. One year of calculus in high school (first principles and derivatives) was taught in a single week (3 hours) in undergrad calculus.

University of Toronto. Infamous for taking in a ton of undergrads for the money, giving as few supports as possible, and then just failing a whole lot of them out.

Language instruction by traditional courses/curriculum is grossly inefficient and ineffective, because courses focus on judging and ranking the students in whatever way is easiest for the teacher to measure rather than on language acquisition per se. Many students come out of several years of instruction with next to no proficiency in the target language, and when they visit a country speaking that language end up lost and confused, unable to follow the most basic native conversations, let alone speak fluently themselves.

Courses should focus substantially on maximizing comprehensible input of spoken language for at least the first half year, with negligible emphasis placed on students trying to learn formally (grammar, spelling, etc.) or make utterances in the target language. After 2–3 years courses should predominantly focus on reading.

Get one student to take a traditional 1 hour per day Spanish course for 3 years and another student to watch an hour of https://youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish/ every day for 1 year and the second student will come out ahead. And that’s just completely passive content from YouTube: a student who has conversations for an hour per day with native target-language speakers (where the student doesn’t try to produce the target language themselves but only listen to it) is going to do better still.

I’ve had something similar to this in high school. We learned the basics of checking and savings accounts, how to write checks and what those funky numbers on the slip meant, how to balance checkbooks (kinda dating myself here), what credit cards are, how mortgages work, how to prepare for a car loan, what impacts credit history, various surprise fees one can accrue (such as using out of network ATMs, or using credit cards for a cash advance).

Around April someone’s accountant dad taught us to fill in 1040EZ. A manager of a local bank branch explained how CDs worked.

For something taught once a week a semester seemed like the right amount, but it was definitely low-key low-intensity class.

No way! How interest works, credit cards, debit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts, brokerage accounts, bonds and time value of money, the stock market (this subject alone can be multiple semesters), IRAs, 401ks, Roth variants, 403bs, pentions, paychecks, taxes (again multiple semesters), mortgages, loans

Giving kids early knowledge of these things is one of the most valuable and useful bases of knowledge that we can give to the next generation.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams reduced personal finance to 9 points. You can maybe quibble with a few of the details but for the majority of middle-class Americans it's good enough.

1. Make a will

2. Pay off your credit cards

3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support

4. Fund your 401(k) to the maximum

5. Fund your IRA to the maximum

6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it

7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account

8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement

9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

these are great!...until we scratch the surface and realize each of these can be done incredibly well or incredibly poorly. There is an enormous amount of implicit knowledge in them. And when knowledge is left implicit in instructions, it gets filled in with what knowledge and knowledge structures already existed.

E.g., paying off credit cards probably means paying them off monthly, but what if it means paying off all the debt I've already accumulated. Do I have to make a will before that?

Guiding credible knowledge construction is hard

The unspoken issue in this thread is that financial education, in fact a lot of education nowadays unfortunately, is unlearning things that are taught wrong at home. If the parents have a bad (not null...bad) understanding of financial literacy or role model bad things, you are fighting an uphill battle.

Scott Adams list is typically shallow...it provides just enough information to look credible while leaving enough flexibility that anyone who fails at this is blamed instead.

The knowledge that most people need for personal finance can fit on an index card:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card

As a parent I clearly saw 3 things that would have given my kids an unfair advantage in their adult life:

1. The foundations of the American legal system - the Mock Trial club took care of that.

2. Financial literacy - I was lazy so I’ve just thrown them some book, like Motley Fool or something. That was enough - for these exact 3 kids. But I can imagine adding some fun in financial course, you can run some mock (or real if you are not scared) investment club etc. The real life issues need not be dull.

3. Learning to fly a small plane - but I’ve realized the advantages of this skill too late, when my friend was flying me from my home to my summer house - over endless lines of stalled traffic…

> 2. Financial literacy - I was lazy so I’ve just thrown them some book, like Motley Fool or something. That was enough - for these exact 3 kids.

The knowledge that most people need for personal finance can fit on an index card:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card

> an unfair advantage in their adult life

How are those unfair advantages? They seem pretty fair.

My lab has research data that engineering students who are nearing the end of their BS degree and are enrolled in entrepreneurship minors and certificates who cannot differentiate between revenue and profit.

What is really interesting is that when asked directly, they can clearly articulate the difference. However, when making decisions typical of early stage entrepreneurship - the terms collapse in on one another and they rely on a series of interesting heuristics that are badly biased towards how entrepreneurs are represented in media.

The reality is that education is slow - especially education about a topic that comes with a lot of 'colloquial baggage'. Students here these terms and have a mental model/memory structure of them. Teaching what seems like 'simple' things is way more than transferring information. It's not bits sent through the air - its like doing an over the air firmware update using AM radio when the received may not have had its battery properly charged - and also installing new programs at the same time.

What I see with finance is a HUGE discrepancy between out of classroom learning.

High socioeconomic advantaged students are just prepared incredibly well for these discussions.

It's very, very uphill for students who don't have that background of wealth to make up for a lifetime of family attention to the world of finance.

Ultimately university coursework is mostly just an introduction to any topic. You have to find the passion to make it a subject of your "dinner table" time to make any progress in a field.

I'd bet many couldn't explain what a logarithm is either.

I don't know, we didn't ask that.

Do you have links to any kind of published data/papers about this? That’s really interesting and I would love to learn more.

This is an early draft version of the analysis...

https://peer.asee.org/engineering-students-misuse-of-busines...

I can see sacrificing a half year of history for this. Practicality has a place in academics as much as lots of other classes. Personally I would have a year long class around the sophomore year on critical thinking and spotting propaganda and bullshit. I taught my kids how to spot bullshit and question everything and I think it has served them well. It got them in trouble a couple of times with teachers but it was a learning experience.

I really wish we had this when I was in school.

We used to when I was in school. It was called "Home Economics," and was a required course for every student.

I very often think the removal of home economics, geography, civics, philosophy, and other basic classes is what has caused so many people to know so little about how the world around them works.

I'm not old enough to have lived in a time when gun safety was taught in schools, but I also wonder if the removal of that portion of the curriculum has contributed to gun violence. Because now, to many people a gun is no longer a tool, but an exotic fetish item to be used for power, not for a purpose.

A friend of mine is a young high-school history teacher who has lamented having to teach this class. Not because he feels it lacks value, but because he has little-to-no personal experience with some of the concepts he's teaching:

- broad investment options (stocks, bonds, indexes, etc)

- real estate

- managing risk / diversification

As a side, can someone recommend any good online content to teach financial literacy for kids?

I can't speak to it, but they were promoting this on public radio: https://www.marketplace.org/2022/04/04/introducing-million-b...

Thanks looks interesting. Will check it out

So, I'm not going to argue against more practical education in schools. But I think whenever personal finance education is brought up, the following needs to be understood:

You can't budget your way out of poverty if you have poverty wages.

> You can't budget your way out of poverty if you have poverty wages.

Generally speaking, one should invest in the asset that produces the most cash flow. For most persons, including those in poverty, one’s own labor is that asset. Based on my experience poverty wages are sufficient to make that investment and get an exponential return, but that was a while ago so perhaps the community colleges or equivalent are no longer sufficient to enter a tech career?

[meta] Hacker News has become a kind of Reddit "General news and curiosities for techies", far from its initial goal:

> Hacker News Guidelines

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: [...] If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Well, this post is off-topic, but at least it's in the "News" category. Other front page posts look more like exotic curiosities (e.g. "The puffer fish helmets of Kiribati", or "Bizarre Talmudic Scenarios").

Can you recommend other communities more aligned with the original HN guidelines?

One of the best "personal finance for kids" books I've come across is The Accounting Game: Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade Stand. It teaches basic concepts like a balance sheet, income statements, profit, and more. I really recommend it, even for adults that want a more fun approach to a notoriously boring topic.

I hope that the new Georgian curriculum takes this approach and not a dry textbook one.

I've found just figuring out a method for tracking your budget can be quite difficult. Whether on actual paper or computer spreadsheet too much detail can make tracking your money become tedious very fast. When it becomes a chore most often that means people will procrastinate or give up documenting their spending.

Georgia does not have adequate teaching staff to teach personal finance. Instead they will invite outside experts from the business community to indoctrinate the kids.

For example: H&R Block, Capital One, Fidelity, Coldwell Banker, RE/MAX, Century 21, BlackRock, Charles Schwab, J.P. Morgan

I think personal finance is itself a broken system, and education about it is like putting up signs about missing steps on a stairway. You can make a super-visible sign or even post an attendant to alert people, but really, those are temporary measures, and the missing step itself should be fixed.

We have the means today to no longer require people to manage their bank accounts and investments and tax deductions. It's a huge waste of effort and time and life's energy.

Personally, I have already refused most of it. I stopped working for money, instead focusing on relationships, volunteering, and personal projects. I've stopped filing my tax returns, because I no longer have to. I no longer have a bank account, investments, etc. And I'm quite happy with it.

Edit: Yes, I am extremely privileged to be able to develop FOSS and have enough support and education and all the other privileges to pull it off. I do not deny this. It still took a lot of courage and discomfort and accepting my own disabilities to get where I am here. And it took rejecting something that everyone had told me was a unalterable given.

What a privilege it must be.

Indeed, but it is a life accessible to all as long as you can find a sponsor to cover your needs and fund your adventures in philanthropy and self exploration.

Curious, how do you practically operate in life? Where do you live? How do you pay for food and living accommodations?

I operate by beginning my day with prayer and meditation. I then follow my calendar appointments, mostly volunteering and classes, and whenever I'm not doing that, I work on my software project.

I live in any spaces which will have me. My needs are very minimal, and through prayer and faith, I am provided for. I eat whatever food is made available to me by the Universe, and when it is not, I am fasting.

If you want to know more details, I recently posted a comment with an overview: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31077742

Very interesting. Thanks for posting that. Good luck on your journey.

so your prescription is that instead of teaching kids how finance works, we tell them to hire some effectively unknowable third party to do it for them? and you think this is appropriate for everyone?

That's capitalism, baby!

You may be speaking from a privileged position, of lifelong financial education & socioeconomic advantage.

Even if you automate your tax deductions, you gotta know what a tax deduction is.

Many people in tech come from a position of privilege. Family backgrounds where things like carried interest and depreciation are dinner table conversations.

It's hard to appreciate. But for families where the younger generation is the first to college, the basics of finance are not obvious.

They should cover everything one needs to know to be a fully independent adult, such as:

- personal and family finance

- woodworking (cabinetry, furniture, carpentry)

- nutrition and food preparation

For the course title, they should name it “personal economics”, or perhaps “home economics”

Worth noting:

> Georgia is the 13th state to mandate personal finance education for its students

As long as they're not encouraging students to "invest" in lottery tickets, meme stocks, and crypto, I think this is a good move.

What is wrong with crypto.

It's not an investment. 1 BTC is always going to be worth 1 BTC.

I’ll take that bet

Even if entire books couldn't be written in answer to that question, that kind of market speculation has no place in a personal finance class. Such a class should teach students the basics they need to make and keep a budget, avoid unnecessary debt, save for retirement, maybe even buy a house, etc. Any kind of market speculation should be left until they thoroughly grasp those basics.

The main thing is that people think that "buying some amount of crypto currency is an investment".

It may be, but way too volatile, much more than people's actual desired risk profiles.

So they have unrealistic expectations where a few people end up winning and way too many end up holding the empty bag.

Statistically, that's not an investment, that's a scheme.

So, like investing your time, mental health and physical health in exchange for incentive stock options then? At least with crypto you don't have to necessarily waste years of your life in vain.

I have made a lot of money with crypto. There is nothing wrong with it, if you understand what you are doing.

People hoarding resources and abusing information asymmetry will always exist, either in the form of crypto pump and dumps, or ellaborate scams like collateralized debt obligations and subprime mortgages and fractional reserve banking and stuff.

Everything is a scam, inflation is legalized theft and just like casinos make their biggest profits from casual players/tourists that do not know how to play, every form of financial transaction takes advantage of people that do not know the rules or the optimal strategy.

> casinos make their biggest profits from casual players/tourists that do not know how to play

This is cute. Do you have a winning strategy at blackjack too?

Have you ever heard of advantage players?

You could ask what's wrong with futures you can become super wealthy overnight. But you can also bankrupt yourself in an hour. Yes risk is part of investing but extreme risk is desperation, gambling, ignorance.

> In the last 12 months, Florida, Nebraska, Ohio and Rhode Island have passed similar laws and are in the process of implementing them for all students.

That's good. Let's get all 50.

Personal finance and knowing your rights as an employee absolutely should be taught. Along with the history of unions, the guilded age, and era of railroad and banking tycoons.

Is education likely to help or are people just making bad choices because in the short term it is desirable?

I make bad choices sometimes, it’s not because I don’t know better…

This is good. Our personal finance lessons came in fifth grade when not one single student could make use of them or retain them long enough to use.

On one hand, I'm in favor of this. On the other, I suspect it'll be as effective as civics and government classes.

Country or state?

It really would be best if we didn't assume US state...

and do not take student loans for low ROI majors!

This is a good move, long overdue.

Will it cover questions like:

  I just did 8 hours of work for ABC Corp., and created $X of value for them, yet somehow I will only be paid $X/8 for my efforts.

I think it's fair to say "unlikely" at best.

I don’t think most people would consider adding a personal finance course to a public school curriculum a mandate.

Those young adults will still have every right to be financially irresponsible.

The part that makes it a mandate is the law that requires it.

I thought the part that made it a "mandate" was that it was outside the legislative branch of government.

Perhaps you are thinking of the phrase "unfunded mandate" which basically when the legislation tells the administration to do something, but fails to allocate funds to do it. Still a law though.

And colloquially, "mandate" often means 'the authority to enact a policy, due to an election.'

If it were a law, we'd usually just call it a law. "Mandate" is recent code for "the police will still arrest you for not doing it, but you can't find it written down anywhere."

So, I'm not seeing that on in the dictionary. You sure this isn't just a you thing?

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