I have never taken a financial literacy class. It wasn't a requirement for me to graduate from high school or for me to be admitted to a four-year college or for me to get an Associate's Degree from community college several years after I left the four-year school, which I did after three years for personal reasons that did not include bad grades.
I am routinely emotionally abused and treated as if I am stupid just because I'm homeless. That happens every day, and it was always like that for homeless people, even before the conglomerate happened. However, being homeless just means that you don't have enough money to have a place to live.
I have never created a lot of debt; I just never saved money or did anything other than live from paycheck to paycheck when I worked. My parents are middle class but I have always been at the poverty level as an adult, even while working full-time. I didn't have a lot of money that I could have saved, but what I also didn't have was any idea what to do with money or how to think about it as something other than money to be spent on necessities like rent or money to be spent on things I felt like having or doing. If I had $10 or $20 left at the end of the month after all of my necessities were paid and I'd spent $50 or less on going out, something to wear or other entertainment, it didn't occur to me to save that $10 or $20 even for the next month, let alone to contribute to something that I could call "Savings."
I wasn't a spendthrift; I didn't have a lot of material things and I didn't go out every night. I just didn't know how to save money.
I also have never thought of how much money I could make as the most important thing about work that I have tried to get. It's not bad or irresponsible not to make a high salary your most important criterion for work, it just means that I never made so much money that not knowing how to save wouldn't lead to the physical danger of homelessness.
Over the past year, I have tried to improve my money management. I use a free budgeting application so that I can keep track of my spending and saving with my phone. I also check my bank account online from my phone. I usually know precisely how much money I have in the bank. I have tried to curb my tendency toward impulsive spending of a few dollars for "this's and that's" which I don't really need. Those few dollars turn into a lot of money for someone who's poor if you're spending them every few days.
I am not stupid. I'm not totally uneducated. I don't and never have had a drug or alcohol problem. I have never done any drugs or been drunk even once or had more than a few drinks TOTAL in my entire life; "a few" meaning fewer than 10 and probably fewer than 5. I don't smoke.
I'm just poor. Even with whatever anyone has ever wanted to say about my emotional or mental condition at any time, obviously I was not too incapacitated to work and get through some school and be good at writing, so why am I not only poor but homeless, and why was I always poor as an adult? Certainly the conglomerate has forced me into chronic homelessness and unemployment, but that has nothing to do with why I was very poor and had no money saved before the conglomerate attacked me in 2010.
Although my situation is extreme because of the conglomerate, I know that I'm not the only person who ever had a good high school record academically and in other ways who just never knew about saving money.
Shouldn't financial literacy be taught in school at every grade level, starting in kindergarten? People should know how to make good financial decisions and avoid bad ones by the time that they graduate from high school; there's no cognitive reason that they can't.
Copyright L. Kochman, December 22, 2015 @ 5:24 p.m.
