Many folks in the personal finance community, both bloggers and mainstream media writers alike, have complained that our high schools should be teaching personal finance along with home economics and shop class. High school students aren’t being educated on the intricacies of dealing with credit cards and their fifty page T&C’s or preparing their taxes or even the fundamentals of saving. Well, Don Silver probably heard those calls and, through Adams-Hall Publishing, put together a book called High School Money Book.
The book itself is quite basic but comprehensive in its coverage of personal finance topics. While it’s targeting high school students, it really applies to anyone who is clueless about the breadth of personal finance topics. It discusses things on how to be frugal, handling debt and credit, being philanthropic, preparing for college, banking, paying bills, etc. It’s more a breadth type of book than a depth type of book. By this I mean it covers a lot of topics at a shallow level without going deeply into any of them. While it has been many years since I was in high school, I think this book hits the mark by educating the reader to the keywords they need to know and the processes they need to become familiar with once they start handling money on their own.
The only concern I have is whether high school students care, which is outside the scope of the book, and whether they’d sit down and read it in book form. With as much information as there is on the internet and the younger generation’s savviness with it, I would think anyone proactive enough to want to read something like this would go directly to the internet; those who are less proactive will probably skip it.
Either way, at a little over 150 pages, it’s a good brief primer on personal finance for anyone.
