In an ever-changing world and economy, the ability to manage your money is a valuable skill that may be difficult to learn. Fortunately, Lexington High School offers personal finance courses that teach students exactly that.
Personal finance should be made a graduation requirement at LHS because the class teaches students how to manage their money most efficiently– not only for a short period of time, but for years to come.
“Personal finance encompasses a ton of things and it ranges from college and paying for college to getting a car, housing, apartments, and just basic budgeting life skills. [It] also covers insurance and retirement too, which are all just really important in your lifetime,” Ramaiza Sohail, a junior at LHS, said.
Personal finance can also benefit students in the long run by making them aware of the dangers of being financially unprepared for the future.
“You’ll read articles every day of people who started saving for retirement or emergency funds really late, and they end up not having those options when it comes to it. As high schoolers, it’s really important for us to know that because there’s so much anxiety about the future,” Sohail said.
In addition to helping students acquire money-managing skills from an early stage, personal finance can be relevant to high schoolers’ current endeavors, like managing funds from a job.
“I have a part-time job, so I do need to budget that money. We also just learned a lot about being able to handle [money] and different types of bank accounts, which is pretty relevant for me because I do need to do all those things, like deposit my check and figure out the different bank accounts I can have,” Sreehitha Bodepudi, a junior at LHS, said
Personal Finance courses would also help students avoid common mistakes that people make when it comes to managing their money.
“Spending too much of your money, not knowing the different types of bank accounts or investment opportunities that are available to you, or just in general kind of being confused about things like credit cards, and maybe if your parents don’t use them, nobody explains how it works so you might just not even see that as something that’s open for you to do,” Bodepudi said.
Developing bad financial habits can lead to a person being financially unstable in the future. As such, widespread personal finance knowledge is essential to helping students recognize these mistakes and address them early on.
Making personal finance mandatory for students may entail challenges: it would require teachers to teach more classes and the school to relocate financial resources. However, given that the course teaches critical skills that students will apply throughout their lives, these changes would be well worth it.
