What Should All Students Know About Money?

The day students begin to learn advance education is the day they are given the exclusive responsibility to watch how they spend their budget. While it is a necessity for the youth to learn how to manage their expenses, it has become a debated topic on whether or not students should be taught money management in schools. Concerned parents and teachers alike consider it as a good way to shape the young mind's sensitivity when it comes to shelling out money, but educational analysts think otherwise, giving a number of reasons in the process:

1. Teachers have not undergone the proper training to teach money management as they also commit specific budgetary mistakes at one point or another.

2. Teachers must not take the role of financial advisors. According to analysts, it is the parents who hold the responsibility to educate their sons and daughters on how to spend money.

3. High school education does not necessarily equate to life training. While the education is a means to get a better future, there are a number of aspects in life which should be learned exclusively outside the school grounds.

4. The curriculum will be put to risk if ever a money management course is given to high school students. There are already a number of lacking hours to accommodate certain subjects, and an inclusion of another class would prove to be a huge disruption.

While the arguments listed above ring useful to parents and teachers, there is no denying how important it is for students to learn how to handle money. Whatever methods and techniques they learn will become crucial factors in the way they make their own money once they grow up. A question looms and must be answered by those knowledgeable. What should all students know about money?

One of the biggest mistakes most students make when it comes to getting money is credit card application. A number of credit programs are too alluring for the young ones. Some give free stuffs such as T-shirts and caps that signing up can be too tempting. What the students need to be educated about is to avoid judging a service's overall appeal, as such only candy-coats certain drawbacks that will prove to be burdensome in the future. At this point, it is crucial for students to maintain a good credit history, so they must learn from their guardians regarding the proper way to sign up.

Organization and planning skills must be developed as early as elementary in order to prepare the youth for the demands of college life. By keeping their finances in good order, they will be able to improve their management skills as time goes by. They should be able to track their spending by using a notebook or even a digital chart. In the process they will also learn the right methods to budget their expenditures. Parents are encouraged to allow their children to commit save-and-splurge techniques such as saving a huge amount of money before shelling it all out to buy an expensive gaming console. By allowing them to do so, they are given the responsibility to hold a huge sum of money and feel immense satisfaction afterwards by achieving a goal.

The question still looms overhead. What should all students know about money? In the end, a student's financial life heavily depends upon teachers and parents. Whether or not it is taught in schools is not the main concern here; it is whether or not the knowledge is passed on to them by all means possible. Personal decision-making process must be prioritized so as to allow them to grow up as responsible individuals.

Basic Math Skills Students Need To Have To Understand Money and Finance

Mathematics plays a huge role in people's daily lives. Every business needs math; otherwise everything will go astray and in chaos. With mathematics, every transaction and operation becomes organized, controlled and structured. With mathematics, buildings and roads are constructed with proper measurements to hold people and cars in and on them. With mathematics, several equipments are being used with so much ease and effectiveness to make life easier. And with mathematics, money and finance management is well structured. Mathematics is indeed very important when it comes to the matters of money and finance.

Every educator especially math teachers, should always include in their teaching plans the basic math skills students need to have to understand money and finance.

Everything should start from the basic, and by basic, it means coins. First of all, students who are at their early ages should be taught how to count coins. Simple counting is always the first step in understanding math. Students should know how to count from 1 to 100 and so on and identify different coins as well.

Next to basic counting, the next basic math skills students need to have to understand money and finance are arithmetic skills. Arithmetic skills include adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing numbers. The most basic of these arithmetic skills for a young student to learn first is addition. Next to counting, students should be able to add coins and paper bills. When one is in a convenience store and he has lots of coins and bills, he should be able to combine different coins, or different bills, or both types of money by adding them together and create an amount enough to buy something from the convenience store. For example, a snack costs about $2.00 and the young student has eight quarter dollars and ten dimes. By knowing how to add, he can just combine four of his quarter dollars and ten of his dimes to produce an amount of $2.00. Another way is to combine all his eight quarter dollars to produce the $2.00. Addition is indeed a very essential skill in handling money.

Next to addition is subtraction. Subtracting is, again, one of the basic math skills students need to have to understand money and finance especially when it comes to counting changes. When a young student only has paper bills when buying something from a store, there are often changes in coins unless the item that he buys has a flat amount in bill. For example, in a convenience store, a young student has to buy snacks costing a total of $2.50 and he has with him a $5.00 bill. By knowing how to subtract, he would how much change will he get after buying the snacks and subtracting $2.50 from his 5 dollar bill he'd know that he will get $2.50 change from his snacks.

Multiplication and division may be a little complex than addition and subtraction but still, these skills are one of the basic math skills needed for a student to understand money and finance. When one is buying 3 snacks, he can just try to multiply the amount of 1 snack to three times instead of adding one snack's price amount to the other's price and then adding the total to the price amount of the third one.

Aside from the arithmetic skills, another basic math skill to teach students about money is fractions and decimals. Fractions are ratios of a part from a whole. Decimals should be taught also primarily because of the reason that prices of items that can be bought are presented in decimals.

These are the basic math skills students should learn first to understand the concept of money and finance. After learning these basic skills, the student can already proceed with the more complex mathematical skills to further learn more about money and finance.

Websites For Learning All About Money

  1. Change Make
  2. Dumb With Money- Reviews common mistakes made with money and finance and how to avoid them.
  3. FDIC: Learning Bank
  4. SmartStart
  5. The US Mint's Site for Kids
  6. YoungBiz