Travel Is The Scapegoat For Covid, Millionaire Regrets Paying Off House Early & Mastercard Opening Up Network To Cryptocurrencies

Any talk about mortgages and interest makes me shudder when today’s generation grows up and has to figure this stuff out. Financial Education in public schools was terrible before the pandemic and now it is even worse. I work in a public school where the business teacher admitted to me he just came off of a bankruptcy (just the type of person you want teaching financial literacy in a school.)

In a public high school, teachers are required to be certified in the subject they teach (ie, a math teacher must get a teaching degree in math, English teacher in English.) However, our state mandated course in Financial Literacy which every student is required to take, has no requirement for teaching it except the person has to be a certified teacher in any subject. So basically every year it gets taught by whatever teacher they don’t have enough classes for. One year we even had 2 of the sections being taught by the French teacher.

One day, I saw one pf my students coming out of the Financial Literacy class (their classroom happens to be right near mine) and I asked her what she had learned that day. Her response was, “Credit cards are bad and people shouldn’t get them.” This is the type of garbage they teach as “Financial Literacy.”

And it is only going to get worse as the “Common Core Math” generation grows up and knows less math that ever before. What common core has done is rush through the most important math topics that people actually need in real life (percents, proportions, ratios) in favor of higher Algebra topics that almost no one uses in real life (like logs, polynomial functions).

I thought exactly the same thing as you did from the title of that mortgage story when I found it, that the story would be about the benefits of holding a fixed-rate mortgage as a hedge against possible interest rates increases, the lost opportunities to invest the money elsewhere that was used to pay off the mortgage, etc. That work-motivation angle was weird- like there must have been something wrong in the first place with the author if he fixated on the mortgage more than the rest of his net worth.

The whole Travel Is A Scapegoat post is interesting. I also think that’s it’s a pretty big generalization. If everyone wears masks and distances (hint – visit your grocery store or gas station to determine if this is true in your area) then domestic travel is pretty safe. Foreign travel – not so much, as illustrated by the virus mutations that have made their way here. If the USA would implement Australia type rules for international arrivals, even international travel would be good.

I think my response to the mortgage guy is “shut up a-hole – you have over $150k in passive income. That’s more than the majority of Americans make working their butts off.”