[jlintz]

One of the best lessons I had was in my senior year of high school with my economics teacher. We did a project where we had to pick a career and research the average salary. Then he showed us how much taxes would be taken out of that pay check and you had your monthly spend. Then you researched a home, car, budget for food and if you could afford it, saving for retirement. Suddenly you saw how quickly the money disappeared and reality hit me. There were so many other factors you could have added in that would suddenly find yourself in negative each month like student loan payments and various "wants"

[lhamil64]

I had a health class in high school that taught things like sex ed, first aid, we even learned CPR (the teacher was also an EMT). I remember one class where we had to bring in newspapers and we drew scenarios like "you are divorced and have sole custody of your child, you make $X/hr" and we had to basically find an apartment in the paper and see if we could make it work, adding in things like food, utilities, etc. IIRC I wasn't able to get my monthly expenses below what I was hypothetically making...