Comment by anon7000

Sure, you don’t need to know the exact details. But you should absolutely leave high school knowing that you need to think about retirement savings sooner rather than later, or you won’t have shit. I remember seeing a chart in high school related to compound interest and how much more someone who started saving earlier had by retirement. That chart was easy to grasp.

And for mortgages, you should definitely learn that renting savings you money compared to owning in a lot of situations (even after accounting for selling the house), especially if you don’t know you’ll live there more than a few years.

Like… where the fuck else is someone going to learn this if they don’t have parent smart enough to teach them that. It’s not like college covers this.

Exposure early doesn’t mean you’re an expert at managing finances when you hit adulthood. That won’t happen. But it can do enough to make you broadly aware of what you should be thinking about — which then means you can look it up more later.

But if you go by comparing yourself to others, you might think it’s normal and good to rack up credit card debt to have nicer clothes or something. You should be aware at how costly credit card debt is, and how easy it is to avoid that.

Like we’re not talking about small optimizations. There are a lot of things that can be extremely expensive and stressful for you if you don’t even know to think about those things.