Eight Reasons High School Makes You Poor

Most high school students would jump at the chance to take a course called "How to Retire Early as a Millionaire."

Forty states include personal finance to some extent in their educational standards or guidelines, according to the National Council on Economic Education. On the surface, this makes it seem that educators in most states realize that high school grads should have a basic understanding of personal finance.

If you dig a little deeper into the numbers, you'll find this is not the case.

The actual implementation of personal finance into high school education is dismal. Only nine states require a course with personal finance content to be offered and only seven states (PDF) require students to take a personal finance course in high school to graduate (Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, South Dakota and Utah).

If you are looking at real-world life and what it takes to get ahead, what you do with the money that you earn when you are young can determine whether you live your life financially secure or paycheck to paycheck.

After graduating and beginning to work is when people should be making quality personal financial decisions, not when they should begin learning how personal finances work.

Here are eight subjects that aren't taught in high school:

1. Realities of Credit Cards

Lack of understanding of how credit cards work causes far more financial problems for people than should ever happen. Credit cards aren't evil, but they can seem that way if you don't know how to properly use them.