Finance Finds Of The Week: Who Sucks at Finance? (Probably You)

Insulted by the title? Don’t worry, I’m not calling you out, I just made an educated guess backed by some statistics, mainly the fact that:

If you’re in the US right now, there’s a 57% chance that you have less than 1k saved, and a 63% chance that you lack basic financial knowledge.

Don’t worry though, this week we rounded up articles all about the state of financial literacy in the US. With these links, you can:

• See how the US stacks up in financial knowledge (Hint: not too hot)
• Test your own financial literacy
• Find resources to boost your own financial literacy
• Check out potential solutions to improving our literacy as a country

335 Days of Financial Illiteracy

First off, this blog post written by Dina Isola, a financial advisor, gives a great description of the state of financial literacy in the US with this article:

Imagine: you give a teenager access to car keys when they have never driven a car or taken Driver’s Education. You simply tell them to drive carefully and you hope for the best.

That would be setting them up for failure, and yet, we do this every day with personal finance.

I highly recommend checking out the rest of her blog as well. She consistently writes blog posts that are equally informative and interesting.

Two-thirds of the world can’t pass this basic financial literacy test. Can you?

If you want to to see where your financial literacy stacks up compared to the rest of the nation, Quartz put out a 5 question quiz to help you easily gauge where you’re at.

How did you do? If you didn’t score very well, no need to worry: the next couple links should give you resources to boost your knowledge. If you did do well, the next links should give you good resources to review and fill any knowledge gaps.

Napkin Finance

Napkin Finance takes complicated financial topics and turn them into napkin doodles that are easy to understand. The napkins are surprisingly concise, making it easy to get the gist of new topics or review old ones.

Power of Financial Mentorship

These tweets on personal finance mentorship from Hannah Wei really resonated with me. I think there’s a strong case to be made on the effectiveness of behavior change that happens through 1-on-1 mentorship based on articles like Atul Gawande’s “Sharing Slow Ideas” as well.

Education is not the magic bullet

Ramit Sethi, author of the popular personal finance book “I will Teach You To Be Rich”, explains how in his opinion, education is seen as the “end-all, be-all” to financial woes, without considering the excecution.

Conclusion

What did you think about these links? Did you agree with the points made in “335 Days of Financial Illiteracy” and “Education is not the magic bullet”? What did you score on the Quartz test? Did you learn from the tweets from Hannah and doodles from Napkin Finance? Let me know whatever you think in the comments below. Thanks for reading!