• tal@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    Three dumb things right here: having that much cash sitting idle in a Roth, paying a broker to purchase stock that you can do on your own for basically free, and putting that much money into such a terrible stock. This person is all kinds of moronic.

    I’ve had some comments earlier about how school curriculum in the US – at least when I went through it – didn’t have any personal finance component.

    I think that there might be a good argument for doing so.

    I’m not saying that it has to cover every financial thing that a person might do, but setting them up from the beginning to have some kind of plan for what’s sensible to do over the course of their life might be a good idea. It’s something that everyone needs to deal with.

    The extent of what my K-12 education did from a personal finance standpoint was teach us to write a check and balance a checkbook.

    It’s hard to cover everything for a lifetime – policies and the environment and such do change – but I do feel like it’d be possible to produce a considerably-better situation than the current one.

    • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Even if American schools would cover personal finance, it would be useless for people who buy stock for irrational reasons. Nobody professional buys Truth Social stock to make money. They buy it either because they think Trump will somehow make them money (which shows how stupid they are), or just because they “love” Trump.

    • shikitohno@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      We went over stocks and taxes in my high school civics class, though I’m not sure how many people actually paid attention to it. If anything, I would say this sort of discrepancy in curriculum between one area and another is a compelling argument for establishing a national curriculum and federal funding of schools in order to wrest control away from backwards politicians that handicap their students in many states.

      Set higher standards across the board, eliminate conservative nonsense policies on topics like sex ed, evolution, CRT or whatever new garbage they come up with, and establish federal funding to make it possible, including hard caps on how much of the budget can be used for athletics relative to academics. If your town wants to fund a new super stadium for the high school football team, great, they can levy local taxes or private funding somehow, as long as the actual school budget for spending on academics isn’t impacted.