A Northwestern journalism student recently interviewed me for the story How Do You Make Young People Care About Personal Finance? As a personal finance blogger writing for a generation that is (supposedly) either apathetic or ignorant about personal finance—this question keeps me up at night. Look at the number of personal finance blogs with younger writers (and the comments on them), and you don’t get a picture of a generation that doesn’t care about money. But we bloggers (and even blog readers) are a tiny minority. Assuming there is a critical mass of young people that aren’t involved in learning about their own personal finances, the question becomes, should we care? And, assuming we should care, can we make them care about their own money?
Why Financial Literacy is Important for Everybody
It’s easy for people with their financial ducks in a row to look down at the massively indebted or the financially illiterate and think: “Those poor suckers will never get out of the hole, but at least I’ll be set.” When it comes to money, you do have to look out for your own to some extent. But can you simply ignore your neighbor’s indebtedness? Maybe not.
Few question the factors that led to our recent wide recession: Too much easy credit, too little savings. Even if you didn’t take out a subprime mortgage and fall behind on your payments; even if you didn’t max out ten credit cards five years ago, all the folks that did these things contributed to an economic crisis that probably affected you in some way. At the very least, the value of your home may have gone down. Maybe you lost this year’s raise, a 401(k) match, or maybe you even lost your job.
Therefore, it would seem to me that it’s in everybody’s interest to ensure that as many people as possible are financially responsible.
But Can You Make Other People Care About Their Own Personal Finances?
Unfortunately, I really don’t think so.
PF pundits like Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey are like evangelical preachers for the church of financial responsibility. But just like in religion, it’s hard to convert somebody to financial responsibility who isn’t ready. You need a financial “come to Jesus” moment to realize that you’re wildly in debt, have no savings, or have done nothing to plan your retirement. When people find themselves in those situations, they’re ready to care about personal finances. That’s when the pundits get their followers; when blogs get new readers.
Do you agree or disagree? Do you think it’s possible to get others to care about personal finance before they realize it for themselves? Is it our place to care? To help them?
About David E. Weliver
Yes, it is totally possible to make others a little more aware. You may not be able to make them start a budget, but you can discuss retirement savings, emergency funds, etc. because those make sense at a very simple level.
I wish I could make others care. And I wish money and personal finance was not such a taboo topic. I love talking about it!
I think it all comes down to motivation in the end, and the recession has been motivating many to start caring.
In my own life, I’ve found that starting a personal finance blog has gotten many (25-50%) of the people around me who have never been interested in money and frugality before to start asking questions. And that leads to real learning and change…
So I think we’re seeing positive change. All we can do as individuals (particularly bloggers) is try to inform the public, and we may end up influencing someone close to us, too.
I just moved in with my significant other and I’m struggling with this very topic. I grew up with frugal parents and now I work in personal finance, so its something I’m passionate about. I’m very conscious about my spending habits, savings, retirement and so forth. My boyfriend on the other hand is the complete opposite. He does not pay any attention to his finances nor does he care about the long term. I’m trying to teach him (and I have been since long before we moved in together) but its a very, very slow process. I would have to agree that its something they need to realize for themselves or else it takes a lot of hand holding!
I think everyone should care about their own personal finances but some can go through their whole life not caring about it or passing on the responsibility to others. Perhaps there should be a role in our education system to provide kids at an early age with some financial literacy skills.
I have always thought that by the time you try to teach someone about how to correctly manage their personal finances, it is usually because they are already having trouble with them (whether they know it or not.) If credit cards can spend billions each year to advertise to teens and college students, why can the states not start a high school or even middle school program that helps instill the importance of budgets, saving for retirement, and paying in cash when these kids are young and responsive to learning opportunities. It has become the society that we live in now that financial products are varied and confusing and we don’t even attempt an explanation of the basics to americas youth. We create classes to teach computers and the internet to kids as society changes, so why not realize that financial basics are now a major part of modern society?