what school didn't teach you about money

Why aren't we taught about money in school? What WERE we supposed to learn? In this video, Taha explores the reasons why school fails to teach us personal finance and tries to learn what school was supposed to each us himself.

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SOCIAL MEDIA
Sabrina
Melissa
Taha

CREDITS
Produced by Taha Khan
Video Editing by Christian Connolly, Joe Trickey and Taha Khan
Motion Design by Joe Trickey and Taha Khan
Sound Design by Joe Trickey

Interviews from:
Grant O'Brien
Pete Matthew - @MeaningfulMoney
James Jani - @JamesJani

Special Thanks to Matt Colbo & Maia Mxmtoon

MUSIC

RECOMMENDED READING/WATCHING:

Basics of Money:
• BOOK - Your Money: The Missing Manual by J. D. Roth
• BOOK - Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
• CHANNEL (Non-region specific): @nischa
• CHANNEL (Slight USA Bias): @thefinancialdiet & @MoneyGuyShow

Making Money & Careers:
• CHANNEL for side hustles and entrepreneurship: @OliurOnline

Spending Money:

Saving / Investing:

Debt:

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - taha is stressed
01:08 - why weren’t we taught about money in school???
01:50 - the zoomers are anxious too
02:15 - the zoomers got DEBTS
04:10 - IT GETS WORSE??
04:50 - DON’T DESPAIR, THERE IS HOPE(?)
05:23 - the real reasons we don’t learn about money
07:02 - the video ends here, wait - there’s MORE??
08:18 - money 101
09:53 - makin’ money
10:20 - entrepreneurship !
11:05 - spendin’ money
12:21 - Savin’ money
14:31 - tldr for u subway surfers
15:10 - how to debt
15:35 - good debt vs bad debt
16:38 - student loanz
16:53 - vroom vroom
17:26 - general debt guidelines
18:17 - credit cards :0
18:48 - be nice to urself :)
19:59 - why its so hard to learn about money
20:36 - scams !!!
23:21 - congrats on graduating from money 101 !
23:48 - it was the friends we made along the way
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Welcome to the joke under the fold!

This is less of a joke and more of an observation but I think it is funny that you can make a grilled cheese sandwich with the slang terms for money: Cheddar, Dough & Bread

Leave a comment with the word "Sandwich" to let me know you were here :)

[answerinprogress]

Hey folks! I wanted to chat about the 50/30/20 rule as lots of people in the comments have discussed how it doesn’t fit their reality. I feel like I should have emphasised more that, like everything in the video, it’s is a starting point for a budget rather than a strict rule (if I could go back, I would have not called it a rule and talked more about how it helped me shape my budget).

The cost of living has made things harder for everyone (especially rent!) & the book I based the section off was definitely written for the economy of 20 years ago.

The reason I ended up including it is because I found it really helpful to know where to start - while I too can’t make the 50% work, I found having a structure to be really helpful as a starting point, of how to think about and structure a budget.

I made the video for people like me who were confused and really stressed about money and the last thing I want is to contribute to the stress and confusion. I’m still learning as I go & I hope that this one section doesn’t detract from the overall messages!

- Taha 💛

P.S. the scam investing bots are out in full force, I am doing my best to remove them!!

[tonys.]

The big issue with "spend less than you earn" is when you make very little. You can't save anything when your "needs" takes up 100% of your income.

[VaibhaviDeo]

Sabrina's editing is next level and Taha's editing is unhinged I love itttt

[lodewijk.]

Taha and Grant O'Brian are two people who surprisingly reduce the amount of degrees of separation for anyone on the internet, I suppose it makes sense they know eachother

[gargantuasounds]

I'm a teacher in the UK and I go for the 80/20/0 rule. 80% necessities (incl food), another 20% on food because my initial budget doesn't cover the cost of living increases, and the remaining 0% on future planning and saving. Bish, bash, bosh

[LauraOtermat]

I’ve seen a few of these “learn about money” and “get out of debt” videos. They are all great at laying out the basics (especially this one.) But, I’m always disappointed that they don’t add something about the number of people in a community that can’t make more than they need to spend to survive. We always consider personal finance to be personal responsibility and never bridge the gap to community organizing to lobby for more housing and community goods to help people live within their personal means.

[mitchell]

10:09 I feel like everyone needing a main job AND a side hustle to get by is a frustrating symptom of the growing difficulty of covering basic expenses, driven by stagnant wages and increasing inflation (particularly in housing and food). For our parents' and grandparents' generations it was so easy to get by on a median income, but now it feels like you need a main job AND 1-2 side hustles just to get by.

[lebaronmarcus]

I taught high school Econ in Missouri, and one-size-fits-all financial advice really isn't appropriate for kids from different socioeconomic classes. Some families spend 100% of their income on necessities, some are more prosperous but need to take care of extended family, others have a complex, integrated family fortune, etc.
In the end I turned that into a teachable moment for the richer kids in the class: I gave them an assignment to plan the finances of a poor family. Sophisticated budgeting or investment techniques are useless when the cost of necessities is higher than the family income. They need to make hard choices like moving the family of 4 into a 1-bedroom apartment to save on rent or having the eldest son leave school to work a minimum-wage job.

[gabereitzes]

Absolutely adding “if you like bad news, I have good news for you” into my dialect

[pokefreak]

basics aside, something I never see talked about is how to actually *spend* money effectively.
I grew up poor, so when I became an adult and started working I would just save as much money as possible, minimizing monthly expenses and *never* making big purchases. Now after 4 years of work I'm at a point where the cost-benefit analysis is quite obviously pointing me towards actually buying stuff. I need a new phone, new pc, kitchen appliances, etc. Not buying those things is costing me significantly more time and stress than is worth it. It genuinely feels so alien to be spending money now, almost like some kind of self betrayal.

[ActiveAdvocate]

Only 50% towards necessities? Hon, I'm Canadian: 50% of our money just goes to RENT. This does not even include food, utilities, clothing, anything other than rent. It's MADDENING how high our cost of living is. I'm 33 years old and I still live with my parents for this reason.

[brie]

Reasons Budgets Fail: most people aren't rich enough to spend less than 50% of their income on necessities

[meredithsch.]

I teach a personal finance course in the United States. North Carolina Public Schools requires an entire course for every high schooler. To be fair to everyone commenting here: this was passed two years ago. I got specialized training to teach it, and half the course (9 weeks) is budgeting (including the 20-30-50 plan and emergency funds), investing, taxes, credit formation, and loan management. I pull a lot from Next Generation Personal Finance, which is a New York based curriculum that has a great youtube channel.

[DanikaLeighEllis]

This is a small part of the video, but I'd push back at the idea at 5:47 that wealthy parents pass on good financial advice to their children and poor parents pass on bad advice. Being rich doesn't necessarily mean you're good with money or having financial literacy conversations; you may just have inherited a ton of money. Likewise, poor parents often talk much more about money to their kids, and poor kids likely grow up with a much more clear idea of how far a dollar goes (or doesn't). People aren't in poverty because they have bad financial literacy (at least in the vast majority of cases). They're in poverty because they don't make enough money, and it's impossible to save money when you don't make enough to cover the necessities.

[occamsrazor]

School isn't to teach you how to be a good citizen. It's to teach you how to be a good worker.

[wombatpandaa]

This is why I will always advocate for going to community college and state colleges. Please do not be taken in by the lies of private universities. They are nice, yes, but they are not necessary by any means. The piece of paper you're given at the end qualifies you for the same jobs whether it comes from Podunkville Community College or Ivyleague University. The difference is how you use it and how many good connections you make and opportunities you take. Save your money and invest it in a retirement plan or something.

[Spi]

We were required to take a 1 semester econ ed class in my high school. I know they showed us W-2s and tax forms at least once but since it wasn't relevant to me yet, I didn't retain any info about it for when it was. The only thing I actually learned in that class was that student loans don't disappear if you die bc that was kinda shocking.

[sarahnyxx]

I think an additional part of the problem about financial education, is that the age that we are taught is counterproductive. Learning to manage finances when you yourself don't have finances means you're trying to learn about it without meaningful context or application. And unlike Maths, English, or other classes that iterate year over year hardly giving you time to forget in the meantime, my financial education was a single semester a solid couple years before I would graduate high-school, gain any sort of control of my finances, and try and apply knowledge that unfortunately is two years forgotten. I would rather see it become easier for fledgling adults to find access to high quality resources when the knowledge has meaningful impact on the finances that are now their own, than be taught to a child who has yet to see any meaningful way to apply what they've learned. Well, maybe both is better than one or the other.

[LewDawn]

11:16 lol and we're immediately in the realm of fantasy. imagine only having to spend 50% of your income on things you NEED to spend money on.

[BestOfSound]

Something that really baffled me about this video was, that it never mentioned inflation much. If you Invest your money and you get a return of 4% each year, and inflation is at 4%. At the end of your career you will have the same purchasing power as at the start. This is something very important to understand! For an investment to be worthwhile it needs to beat inflation most of the time.
But I'm also not in the demographic of this video, I do reasonable well financially and I am working on a degree in business and economics with a focus on finance.