What Habits of Bad Money Did Your Parents Teach You?
In a perfect world, every titmouse leaves the nest at the age of 18 with a checking account, savings account, and enough knowledge to pass the popular credit rating quiz. But we all know that sometimes it doesn’t.
Many schools lack personal finance education, and less than half of the states require a basic money management course for high school graduates. At home, parents may not have the ability or confidence to teach their children to make smart money decisions.
I am fortunate that my parents taught me a lot about money as a child. They took me to the bank and explained what we were doing. When I got my first job as a high school student, I was invited to open a checking account. They paid the bills at the kitchen table, where I worked on my homework at the same time every week.
But despite their best efforts, I managed to screw it up.
My mother doesn’t like debit cards, and I don’t mean that she just doesn’t like using them. I mean, she never had that . So when I headed off to college with my first debit card tucked into my wallet, let me tell you what I quickly became an expert on: overspending on my checking account.
My mom taught me how to balance in a checkbook, but in my freshman year in college, I was balancing almost nothing. She didn’t know how to warn me about the risks of using a debit card that didn’t have a smaller ledger to record every transaction. I studied on my own and I definitely learned the hard way.
So we sit, you and me. Maybe you are someone who lacked personal financial education, someone who had to figure things out on their own. Someone who has no doubt understood some of these things in the most difficult way. Someone who may have paid almost the same overdraft protection fees as I paid in my early 20s.
What bad financial habits did you learn from your parents as a child? What lessons did you fail to learn at home in time to prevent money problems? What bad habits are you still trying to get rid of as an adult?
Let us know in the comments. And if you learned to overcome those bad habits that you learned in your youth, how did you manage it?