Adding insult to injury:
Research suggests that most Americans have extremely low levels of financial literacy. The Jump$tart Coalition for Financial Literacy tests 12th graders every two years by asking them practical money questions and consistently records an average score of 50 to 55 percent. Other research shows that about 3 in 4 workers don’t know how much money they need to save for a comfortable retirement, and only about half of respondents in one study were able to correctly answer two simple questions about interest rates and inflation.
These statistics pain me deeply, because financial literacy is as important as traditional literacy in today’s world of self-directed retirement accounts, preference for debt financing, and increasingly complicated investment vehicles.
Of course, we need schools to teach "read’n, ‘rit’n, and ‘rithmetic" first …
