Today, who holds the responsibility of teaching young adults (and even children) financial preparedness? Is it the public school where your children currently attend or is it you, the parent? Nowadays it seems to me that parents leave it to the public schools to educate their children on academics as well as real life situations. The problem: laziness and lack of teaching your children important principles will leave them looking elsewhere for information. They will pick up common trends and could even be misinformed. Such information could really hurt and leave a negative impact on them later on in life, whether it be emotionally, mentally, or physically. Besides teaching verbally, the best possible way to teach is by being an example.

I won’t deny it, my parents were not the best teachers when it came to financial preparedness. In fact, growing up I watched them use the credit card for everything. Of course they owned a business and if you are an owner of a business you would know that a credit card is a bare necessity; however, in my home, a credit card was used for absolutely everything. There was no encouraging of putting money in a savings or investing in a bond, mutual fund, or CD. Budgeting is a word I learned on my own after I moved out and found an excessive amount of debt that had somehow accumulated in the balance of my credit card and saw no possible way to pay it off with the wage I was making. I do have to give them some credit for putting such a big emphasis on getting a real job at the age of 14 to purchase the things that I would need or want in hopes to teach me responsibility, however, the education on properly saving and investing my money was never given to me.

Teaching children to be financially prepared should be the responsibility of the parents, not the school. I do agree that the school should hold a required course on the basics of money education to reinstate what has been taught by the parents, not to mention new discoveries and statistics of this particular subject, however, what good is it if the parents are not being the prime example?

In a recent press release on April 30, 2006 with Blue Financial it states that 40 percent of workers between the ages of 21 – 30 have not even begun to plan for a retirement by investing in a retirement fund or some other type of investment service. It also states that among this group of young individuals there is a lack in knowledge of good and bad debt which could affect the economy negatively years to come.

Financial preparedness should be taught to children and young adults by the parents. Public schools, as well as private schools, should hold a mandatory class to educate students on money education; however, parents should be the example and take most of the responsibility. To help those get out of debt and prevent debt from accumulating in years to come, education is the key.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Credit, Debt, Personal Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.