It’s sorely lacking. My parents didn’t have good habits and taught me little. In high school accounting class I got some education, but even that was faulty and was geared more towards getting in debt to build your credit.
Personal finance needs to be built into classes for all 12 years of school. Every math class should have personal finance built into it as examples. The opposite actually happens. Kids learn that they need to have credit cards as soon as they can and they do. They get into credit card debt at 18 and die 60 years later with credit card debt. I don’t think anyone should graduate high school without knowing time value of money and compound interest equations like the back of their hand.
You use a credit card with a high interest rate and you’re basically agreeing to pay 500% of the purchase price for whatever you bought. You can literally show people this fact on a chalk board and they still won’t believe you. Those $100 boots are on sale for $50 if you use the store credit card? Well, if you use the store card and pay your balance over time like 95% of all credit card users do, you’ll have payed $250 or more for those $50 boots by the time you pay them off.
The fact all consumers don’t know about compound interest, effective interest rates, and the time value of money is a crisis. And my word is it impossible to pay off credit card debt once you accumulate several thousand or more. Nothing makes a dent and then a crisis happens and you need to go into more credit card debt because you e been paying credit card bills rather than building an emergency fund.
I know couples making $175K a year who are broke because they don’t know basic finance. I know other couples making $55K a year who are financially set because they do know finance. It’s a crime and a scam against the American people that the basic tools of knowledge aren’t given to everyone.
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