Tennessee Gets Serious About Personal Finance For Teens
November 24th, 2011 Filed under: Business Car Finance — Finance Author
If you live in Tennessee then you’ll really like this story. They’re getting really serious about teaching personal finance to teenagers. I think this is a wonderful idea and one that more states hopefully start doing too. Personal finance is such a critical skill I always wondered why it wasn’t taught more in high-school. Here’s the story:
A personal finance class required for all Tennessee graduates is more personal than ever, as the first students required to take it move toward the realities of higher college tuition and fewer job prospects than for graduates in previous decades.
For many, issues covered in the class credit card debt, nonexistent savings accounts and 401Ks and underemployment are already playing out at home.
At Maplewood High School in Nashville this week, senior Estefany Lopezs teacher asked if anyone in the class earned more than $8.50 an hour, part on an exercise on covering car maintenance costs.
Lopezs hand shot up. She watched her father lose a chef job two years ago, her mother pick up two jobs, and now she cleans rooms at the Hermitage Hotel. She contributes $400 a month to family rent and electricity, unlike friends, she said, who buy shoes to match each outfit or get their hair and nails done every week.
A lot of us dont know how to budget our money or go ahead and spend it on whatever, Lopez said. I dont want to struggle for money. I want to go to college and have it easier.
The class is a requirement for all 2013 graduates, but some schools are funneling earlier grads into it. Tennessee introduced the course in part because the state has ranked at or near the top for number of bankruptcies in recent years, but Missouri, Utah and Virginia also require a personal finance course before graduation.
See the Original Story here
