I’m not a financial advisor. My background is computer science, not finance. I grew up middle-class with a saving mindset drilled in early — spend less than you earn, don’t waste — and on paper I had all the right pieces. A credit card and the points that came with it. A 401(k) at work. Taxes I filed myself every spring. I knew the words. I could use them in a sentence.
But I had no real idea how any of it actually worked. What an APR was quietly costing me. Whether I was leaving money on the table. What that 401(k) was even doing, or how to make it do more. I recognized the terms the way you recognize a language you can’t actually speak. I was, in the honest sense of the word, financially illiterate — and I had to teach myself, slowly and from scratch, before I finally felt steady with money instead of vaguely anxious about it.
I also watched the other version of this up close. People in my own family didn’t avoid money because they were lazy or careless. They avoided it because it felt overwhelming and no one had ever shown them where to start. So the hard things didn’t get done. Savings that didn’t happen. Investing that felt too risky to even read about. A 401(k) match — free money, about the closest thing in finance to a free lunch — left on the table year after year. Out-of-network medical costs that could have been partly reimbursed, if anyone had known to send in a superbill, quietly written off instead.
None of it was dramatic. That’s the part that stuck with me. The cost of avoiding money usually isn’t one catastrophe — it’s a slow, steady leak. A little less every year than there could have been.
Here’s what I kept coming back to: almost none of us were taught this. Not in school, not really anywhere. We’re expected to arrive at adulthood already knowing how to handle the one thing that touches every part of our lives — and when we don’t, we’re made to feel like that’s a personal failing instead of a gap in how we were all educated.