The Gutman Group

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While sitting at my desk forged out of solid platinum I came to thinking about all of the financial troubles I constantly see people struggling with, especially the younger generations. Then, I came to a neat, yet truthful realization – it’s not all our fault.

It’s not ALL our fault, anyway.

Here are three things to blame before you start blaming yourself for the reason you now have to count every square of toilet paper and reuse apple skins:

1. The Parents

Why aren’t you rich you may be asking? There are a lot of answers to that question, but first and foremost – you simply weren’t raised to be.

According to the Globe and Mail and the Angus Reid Strategies poll, parents feel better prepared to discuss sex, drugs and alcohol than to broach the topic of finances – a finding that shines a light on the actual state of adult financial literacy.

Parents alone shape what we think of money from the earliest of ages, and whether that is a message of scarcity or abundance, saving or spending – it’s embedded into our thinking from an early age.

So, why do parents shy away from talking about money? Why don’t they vigorously teach us how to manage our finances the same way they yell at us to put a hat on before going out or to use a condom when things get a little steamy?

Money talk takes a lot of time. There is no one solution for it versus the solution for safe sex being a condom or getting into a good college being to study.

A lot of parents simply don’t feel qualified-enough to speak about the subject, most just don’t understand or find the value in personal finance (a sad truth) and thus raise their kids the same way – with a lack of financial knowledge.

2. The Schools

Schools are there to teach us how to make in the big world, or so they say. We learn how to pamper babies in Family-Ed classes, calculate the time a snail makes it over a branch and count all the atoms in a molecule of nitrogen – yet to realize what the purpose behind all of this is.

According to the Young Americans Center for Financial Education, of the 6,000 students who took a personal finance survey in 2006, 62% received failing scores, with 60% being the lowest passing grade – that’s not very reassuring.

The average American high school student doesn’t know what a stock is, let alone knows that stocks tend to yield higher returns than bonds over a long-term period.

One thing schools surely fail to prepare us for is the reality of the money centralized world we live in. Money is the topic of our daily news at all times, money is what makes this world go around, and yet, why do schools fail to realize the importance of financial education over Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet?

Perhaps it’s because schools expect parents to teach their kids about the rather personal subject of money and how to manage it, although we clearly see that that is not the case.

I have nothing against old Willie and his Medieval English, but more and more students are getting into more and more debt before even graduating from high school.  It’s not uncommon to find high school students that are thousands of dollars in credit card debt or college graduates who owe close to a hundred thousand dollars in loans.

Economically, that is a bigger threat than unsafe sex and massive alcohol consumption combined.

Although, it seems that the public school system realized this, with the Obama administration considering implementing mandatory financial literacy courses into the curriculum and Canadian schools preparing to implement mandatory financial education in 2011, starting with grades 4 to 12.

3. The Media

With 13.9 billion minutes (approx. 26,445 years) of our time being spent on Facebook every year and with an average of 35 hours of TV watching per week, Americans are breaking all world records for media consumption.

Knowing this, it is no exaggeration to say that our kids are being raised and parented by TV and video games more than by their actual parents, and with an average of only 20 minutes spent on reading a day by all ages it seems that we might soon forget how to read as well.

No, watching TV doesn’t necessarily make you poor, but considering the alternatives to watching reruns of Entourage (developing a business idea, getting smarter or simply getting out there and making money) unwillingly brings us to that conclusion.

While advertisers are doing an amazing job at selling Snuggies to millions of people to keep their toes from freezing off in order to make watching TV more comfortable, so do other companies love the passive mental disorder we all fall into when it comes to watching the idiot box.

With our brain fixed to absorbing all the information that comes from the screen we have been called the laziest nation in the world, and to add to the matter, the one most heavily in debt per capita.

Media doesn’t teach us how to manage our money, in most cases it makes us pick up the phone and buy an extra Snuggie or the Slap Chop.

And then lo and behold comes a credit card ad that claims it will make your life so much easier, it will collect you air miles to take you to the ends of the world, it will save the world of greenhouse gases by being made out of recycled plastic, and with every thousand dollars you spend you get a dollar back just to make you feel all the better.

In Closing

You can blame everyone else for the reason you are poor all you want, but that’s not going to get you anywhere. The point of this article is to get you to realize your mistakes so that you know what to work on in order to start moving away from the world of coupon clipping into the world of diamond bowling balls.

All you have to do is act.

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