Scouts aim for personal management badge
Do these kids know more than you about personal finance?
Boy Scouts are too young to get payday advance loans. However, with a new merit badge up for grabs, more will be ready to properly evaluate their financial options when they become adults.
To earn the personal management badge, Boy Scouts must be able to correctly answer questions about credit, interest and budgets.
Take the quiz
There aren’t any questions about payday advance loans on the Boy Scouts’ quiz, but a little financial literacy goes a long way. If children and teens learn to understand budgeting and long-term interest, they’ll be better prepared to make financial decisions of all types. You can take the Boy Scout quiz at CNN Money to find out if you have the know-how to manage your money like a Boy Scout.
Financial education becoming popular
Possibly the best fallout from the recession is the new-found interest people are taking in financial education. Christian Science Monitor points out that “20 years ago, personal finance was significantly less complex than it is today.” The same article advocates that more states should add financial education requirements to public school curricula.
Land of opportunity – and options
It’s true, personal finance is a lot more complicated nowadays. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. People have a lot more options today than they did 20 years ago. Things like payday advance loans were born out of people’s changing needs as our money culture adjusted to becoming more credit-based.
It makes a lot of sense to educate people about long-term and short-term credit options — the sooner the better.
Good examples
We can rest assured that Boy Scouts will emerge from their programs ready to perform CPR, tie knots and evaluate whether payday advance loans are their best option. But what about everyone else? Financial education should be required for everyone. More states need to follow Kansas’ example and write up bills that would require financial literacy to graduate from high school. That way people will learn to use payday advance loans responsibly and won’t get stuck with bad debt.
I wish they did this when I was in Scouts. That would have been a great idea, and it probably would have lasted, although I forget how to tie all the different knots. I think it is paramount that we educate our kids from the get-go about personal finances and how to use money effectively.