Giving Compass' Take:

• Rebecca Shoval highlights the importance of teaching children fundamental personal finance skills to increase financial literacy and help secure their futures. 

• COVID-19 brought new challenges to many families. How will personal finance help in the future? How can donors help school districts offer these essential courses? 

• Read how partnerships can help inject financial literacy into schools.

At the start of the coronavirus shutdowns in March, many Americans had no savings to fall back on. Do people deserve to be paid more? Absolutely. But no amount of income is going to teach people to become savvy budgeters and savers, skills which are critical to developing a secure financial future.

On a macro level, we need to tackle this problem from the start and add comprehensive personal finance to our educational curriculum. These fundamental skills need to be taught in middle school and again in high school, on age-appropriate subjects. (It'll help these kids understand the true cost of that Billie Eilish merch they want.)

We expect adults to be able to tackle a myriad of personal financial matters, from deciding whether to rent or buy a home to saving for retirement. We ask 17- and 18-year-old high school students to pick colleges and potentially be saddled with debt from those choices for next 25+ years. (Pick in-state public colleges. Your adult self will thank you.)

Yet we don't equip people with the skills to make these decisions. When we finally learn about credit scores in our 20s, it's truly a rude awakening. Even if people understand that taking on lots of debt can hurt your credit score, how many know that a lack of debt is also a problem? Young people lucky enough not to have to take on debt via student loans or credit cards end up with low credit scores because they haven't had a consistent payment history.

This isn't a new problem; this type of education should have long been part of the curriculum.

Read the full article about financial literacy and personal finance classes by Rebecca Shoval at Business Insider.