Is Financial Literacy Overrated?

In my opinion, I would say that financial literacy is more underrated than overrated.

Especially in countries like India, most of the educational institutions are least bothered about this subject. They feel it’s not necessary and not worth the time to teach lessons on finance. They believe subjects like math, chemistry, and physics are much more important and useful in life than financial education.

The foundation of the school curriculum is itself built in this way. Priority is given to the most unnecessary subjects, and ignorance is given to the most useful and necessary subjects, financial literacy in this case.

Yes, it is definitely true that academic qualification is important but so is financial education. They are both important and the educational institutions are forgetting one of them.

Today’s youth are prepared mostly to enter the stage of financial independence and high-paying jobs.

But the point we all ignore is that it leads to a false sense of financial security as the money they earn is ill-spent leaving the person with an empty pocket despite long hours of hard work. The reason behind this is the lack of financial education.

Money saved is money earned but money invested is money profited upon.

Monetary risks are termed by people who are not financially smart. Financial literacy gives you confidence and responsibility to handle your finances. It makes you a better financial decision-maker.

In fact, I would say that financial literacy and subjects which are very important in a person’s life like problem-solving, crisis management, and time management should be overrated. They should be prioritized because a person can live without knowing the historical dates of a war or a solution to some complicated algebraic equation, but he/she will definitely face problems in dealing with his/her finances, time, or any kind of problems which is when these skills come in handy.

Money, economy, finance, all these are connected to our lives in some or the other way. We all HAVE to deal with it, whether we like it or not. Whatever job you do at the end of the day you are paid with money and you need to plan your income statement well.

So more than a subject, financial literacy is a necessity. More than being underrated and overrated, it is essential and crucial in every person’s life.

Financial literacy also includes studying money circulation, taxation, and study on the economic crisis. It’s a much broader subject and teaches us a lot of extra skills. Our jobs, our expenditures, our salaries, and so on, all these are dependent on the pillars of financial literacy. Hence financial literacy is a fundamental and crucial requirement that needs to be implemented into the curriculum and taught to people from a very young age in order to fix the problem deep-rooted.