For Financial Literacy Month, I put together a reading list, an “investor help” list and some videos for TheStreet Foundation.
The reading list is here.
The “investor help” list is here.
Here’s an interview I did with Helaine Olen, author of Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry.
And here’s a Q&A with Remar Sutton, volunteer chairperson at FoolProof, a rare financial literacy effort that actually gets results.
April is Financial Literacy Month, which is supposed to be a time when we marvel at the progress we’ve made in making the public smarter about finance.
Yet after nearly two decades of effort, the studies not only show little progress, but actual backsliding in the public’s financially savvy.
The problem has much to do with who’s in back of most literacy efforts: business. A credit card company isn’t going to warn you not to spend more than you can pay off in a given month, and a brokerage firm isn’t going to send you to Finra’s BrokerCheck to be sure you’re broker isn’t a sleazeball.
I wrote about the problems with literacy efforts in my column for TheStreet. You can read it here.