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Where Do Kids Learn Basic Finance?
May. 7th, 2026 06:08 pmA topic I see pop up regularly in online discussions is Who should be teaching kids basic finance? Often this appears as jeering or hand-wringing about adult children who are now in their 20s and are clueless about things like balancing their debit accounts and not way overspending on credit cards. This week I even saw a news article about a young woman who is suing her parents for not teaching her adequately about basic finance. It seems she's deep in debt and has gotten the (bad) idea that suing mom & dad is the way out of it.
Often this issue is framed as "Schools need to teach kid basic finance". I'm not sure that putting it on schools is the right answer. It's one of those things, like brushing your teeth and tying shoe laces, that really needs to start at home. Schools are pretty overloaded right now just with the academics they need to teach. Plus, my own experience with school trying to teach household budgeting was pretty ridiculous. The lesson taught us to buy the cheapest stereo or we'd go broke.
Not that my own parents were great teachers of household finance, either. I mean, I learned some important basics. I learned that money was limited and credit cards had to be paid... eventually. And I learned thriftiness vis-a-vis making things last... even to the point of ridiculousness. But my parents never made a budget or stuck to one. They made spending decisions always on a case-by-case basis that basically boiled down to, "Is Dad in a good mood right now?" And the truth was they were deep in credit card debt because they were overspending their income for years.
Ultimately the lack of teaching or modeling on basic finance didn't hold me back too much. I'm a smart enough person that I figured it out on my own. The real basics like "Money doesn't just appear" and "You need to pay for it now... or add interest paying for it later" were intuitively obvious. Balancing a checkbook was just basic arithmetic. More advanced knowledge like how to invest savings I developed over time through my own constant learning.
Often this issue is framed as "Schools need to teach kid basic finance". I'm not sure that putting it on schools is the right answer. It's one of those things, like brushing your teeth and tying shoe laces, that really needs to start at home. Schools are pretty overloaded right now just with the academics they need to teach. Plus, my own experience with school trying to teach household budgeting was pretty ridiculous. The lesson taught us to buy the cheapest stereo or we'd go broke.
Not that my own parents were great teachers of household finance, either. I mean, I learned some important basics. I learned that money was limited and credit cards had to be paid... eventually. And I learned thriftiness vis-a-vis making things last... even to the point of ridiculousness. But my parents never made a budget or stuck to one. They made spending decisions always on a case-by-case basis that basically boiled down to, "Is Dad in a good mood right now?" And the truth was they were deep in credit card debt because they were overspending their income for years.
Ultimately the lack of teaching or modeling on basic finance didn't hold me back too much. I'm a smart enough person that I figured it out on my own. The real basics like "Money doesn't just appear" and "You need to pay for it now... or add interest paying for it later" were intuitively obvious. Balancing a checkbook was just basic arithmetic. More advanced knowledge like how to invest savings I developed over time through my own constant learning.
