Financial education for kids - The key to preventing another economic disaster

by: Daniel Blackhall

As the country is experiencing it's worst financial crisis since the great depression, there is much debate on what we could have done differently. There are a thousand opinions on this matter, but one thing is for certain, if the U.S. population had a better level of financial literacy many of them would not be in such bad trouble.

It seems that all the blame is going towards reckless lending practices and the lack of government oversight. Aren't we the consumer partially to blame as well?

We had no control over the irresponsibilty of lenders in the housing and financial markets, but we could have been better educated on the terms of the dangerous loans we were signing up for. Maybe, if we understood more about the type of agreements we were entering into, many of us would have realized they were poisionous before it was too late.

We could have known that we were spending way beyond our means, even when the payments looked resonable at first.

Additionally, we could have known that amassing massive amounts of credit card debt would financially cripple us over time. This knowledge may have helped us to be more responsible with our personal finances, and helped us maintain better credit ratings. We could have saved more, and not leveraged our debt to unmanagleable levels.

As we can see, many of us did not know this information and are now paying dearly for it.

Even though we can't go back in time, there are measures we can take to prevent such wide-scale problems from happening in the future. The key is financial education for our kids. As a nation. We need to learn more about credit, personal finance and banking. It is also our responsibility to teach our children financial responsibility at an early age, so they aren't doomed to repeat our mistakes.

Unfortunatly, kids do not get much, if any, financial education in school, so the honous is on the parents to provide this knowledge to them. Many of us do not know enough ourselves to really provide the financial training our children need. Kids Credit School devedloped a comprehensive financial literacy program to help parents in this situation. Our training classes help children and their parents learn how to be financially responsible. Learn more about how we can help keep your kids safe from the economic disaster many Americans are facing today.