Investing is now pop culture and fashion.
None of us are taught about money in school.
It’s about learning how to leverage the system as it is to build wealth and stability for you and your family. That means understanding tax loopholes, business write-offs, insurance plans, and a whole host of other financial tools wealthy individuals use to maximize their bottom line.
It is good that you came to most of these conclusions. Let me add some perspective that may actually help you and others.
“None of us are taught about money in school.”
Here is an important article that explains how insightful your remark is:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-necessary.html
We in America have so many things wrong that lead massive numbers of people into the giant loser-sieve called “marketing”. This is everything from influencing to copy-writing to graphic arts and to whatever is on the web.
The problems that Americans have is actually quite bigger: nonsense ideology. Take schooling. There are a set of assumptions in the American education system that say “everyone can learn” and kids should “follow their dreams” and “ambition, ambition”. All nonsense. And the USA is the only country on earth that conceives of and operates their education system with such notions. Education in all the rest of the developed world is viewed as an economic undertaking first that should ready people for being part of the economy. There is in every other developed country an assumption that not all children are able to learn the same things. Some are better adapted to being cashiers or plumbers and others being engineers and others still as various professions.
Although systems vary somewhat, take Germany. First of all, there is virtually no private education. All kids go to the same type of school until they reach 5th grade. Starting in 6th grade they sort them into 3 groups: practical, professional, academic. The next 2 grades the kids get slightly varying curricula. After 8th grade they are then directed to one of the 3 tracks and go to schools/classes which begin to prepare them for their presumed track. After 12th grade, they go to the next set of tracks: vocational, professional, academic. All of these are not just free and the students are given stipends and housing (if need be). No one has debt, it is all state money.
There is a lot more to be said, but to bring it back to your ‘learning about money”… Most Germans and indeed most Europeans have little to know idea about markets and investing. There is no need, just as there once wasn’t in the USA. Even with my (largely self-sourced) technical learning, I could very well have relied only on that and possibly still had to learn everything about money and investing. Instead, I luckily ended up in the financial sector and, like so many there (but not all…I advise friends) I also could have ended up clueless.
If the USA would exit its ideologies (“freedom”, “greatest country”, “everyone’s a winner”) then we could actually start to fix things and have the kind of well-functioning and fair economy like Germany’s. Or Holland’s or Denmark’s or Sweden’s, etc.
Hope this helps you and others.
