In the last column we listed the first three of my ten reasons to learn about personal finances, and to teach them to your children. There are many other reasons. These ten were just the first ones to come to mind. Here are the last seven.
1. You don’t want the poor management of your finances to prevent you from achieving not only your financial goals, but your career and life goals.
2. It is not about your Academic IQ, it is about your Financial IQ, and the two are not the same. Also it is not about how much money you have in life, it is about how you manage your money, and those two things are not the same either. You need to see the professionals in bankruptcy court (teachers, engineers, nurses, etc.), who have so mismanaged their money, and they had plenty of it.
3. People need to save more, and be better spenders. I believe that it was Einstein who said that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe, and Franklin said a penny saved is a penny earned.
4. If you don’t budget and track and analyze your spending, in this hyper-consumer, keep-up-with-everyone society, your spending will control you.
5. The pandemic taught us a lot of things, but one for sure was that you need an adequate emergency savings account, because bad things happen to good people every day.
6. In today’s complex financial world, you cannot be in control of your life, unless you are in control of your finances.
7. The largest increase in bankruptcies before the pandemic was among Americans 65 and older, who did not save enough for retirement, and are, in many cases, still addicted to debt and living above their means.
Also in the last column we noted that as an additional employee benefit, more employers are offering a match for employees saving for emergencies, and that there are more possible government incentives in the works for Americans to create an emergency savings account. By the way, it is still nearly 40% of Americans who say they don’t even have a $400 emergency savings fund. At any rate, a reader reminded me this last week that I have often talked about setting up a match program for …….