Finance….something oh so very important and something that everyone needs to be somewhat familiar with to make it in this life. Finance is everywhere and needed every day to make sure our lives and our world is running smoothly. So, what exactly is it? Finance is defined as the management of money and includes activities like investing, borrowing, lending, budgeting, saving, and forecasting. There are many different kinds of finance. For example, personal, corporate, and government. But the main one the effects everyone is personal finance. How do we learn personal finance? I know I wasn’t taught about it in school. Who really was? And why don’t all schools require you to learn about it? In the end, I think everyone who had to learn about it on their own can agree that they would be in an even better position right now if it was taught in school. So why should financial literacy be taught in schools? 

First and foremost, odds are if students don’t learn this important information in school, they’re going to have to learn about it in another way. Not every student has the luxury of learning it at home with their parents and many have to learn through their mistakes. In the end, putting young adults in worse positions than they should be. 

Learning from your mistakes absolutely works, however, you’re putting students at risk of making mistakes that are extremely tough to come back from. For example, it takes a very short amount of time to ruin your credit, and forever to come back from that. Why put students in these situations when they don’t have to be? 

Thirdly, money controls everything. Everything we do every day requires money. The things we do today take part in what our future looks like. Not everyone realizes that buying a credit card at a young age, is helping them build credit for the house they will buy one day. As soon as a student turns 18 they don’t even realize that the decisions they make every day will affect them in the future financially.  

Lastly, we should want better for our millennials. Let the new generations learn from the older generations’ mistakes. We see the consequences of not teaching students soon enough about financial literacy, so why hold our new generation back and stop them from being successful in their lifetime? We need to educate so every year, every decade we are becoming better as a whole giving more people equal opportunity to have a secure financial life.