April Is Financial Literacy Month. There's One Thing They Still Won't Teach You.

April is officially Financial Literacy Month.

Schools, banks, and government programs will spend the next 30 days teaching people how to budget, save, and avoid credit card debt.

Ok maybe not public schools.

All solid advice. Genuinely useful. And also incomplete in a way that matters.

Here's what traditional financial literacy covers:

Make a budget and stick to it
Build an emergency fund (3-6 months)
Pay off high-interest debt first
Start investing early (compound interest)
Don't spend more than you earn

Good rules. If you follow them, you'll be ahead of most people.

So why are millions of people doing all of this and still falling behind?

The part they leave out:

Financial literacy programs teach you how to play the game. They never teach you how the game is built.

Your grandparents bought a house on a single income. Your parents needed two. You might need two incomes and a side hustle. This isn't because people got lazier or dumber. For some people that's true lol. But for most people, something deeper is going on.

Since 2020 alone, weekly household grocery spending has climbed 25-30% depending on whose data you look at. By 2028 we're on schedule to be spending a TRILLION dollars on groceries alone!

The official CPI says food inflation over that same period was closer to 20%. Both numbers are real. The gap between them is where frustration lives.

The dollar buys less every year. That's a structural feature of how modern money works (more dollars created = each one worth less).

Every financial literacy program teaches you to save dollars. Almost none of them teach you why those saved dollars keep shrinking.

----- This is why we built The School of Bits -----

Budgeting matters. Saving matters. But understanding why your budget keeps breaking even when you follow the rules? That's the piece worth adding.

Hard assets (things with fixed or limited supply) behave differently than cash in an inflationary environment:

Gold.

Real estate.

Bitcoin (We wrote the easiest explainer on it. PDF is free for skool members in the classroom. Or you can get a paper copy on amazon. 4.7 stars for a reason).
AI compute and other emerging overlooked assets.

Understanding how and why these assets behave so different is the financial literacy that's still missing from the curriculum.

We teach that part here. Every week. For free.

What's the one money lesson you wish someone had taught you earlier?

What economic/finance topic do you want to learn more about?

Let us know below. Seriously. Sometimes the answers in this community are better than most textbooks.

0 comments