5 Money Lessons School Never Taught You

There’s no doubting the fact that school teaches us many things like how to add and subtract and how to find the areas of a triangle. Unfortunately, a lot of what you learn in school isn’t exactly that practical. For instance, how many times have you had to find the value of “X” to solve a real-life problem? I’m guessing almost never and while school does teach you how to do these types of things, they also miss out on teaching you other critical life lessons, many of which relate to your finances!

Here are 5 of the lessons they missed the mark on the most!

Lesson #1: You must invest more and save less

The first finance hack that you will never learn from school is that you must invest more and save less. In school, you were taught that a good money practice is to save your money. This is partly true but if you want to build sustainable wealth, then you need to do more than saving your money — you need to learn to multiply your money which you can only do through investing.

So what’s the difference between saving and investing? Saving money simply means keeping aside a portion of your earnings for future use while investing is using your money to buy assets that can yield a profit over time. Now don’t get me wrong, saving money is critical to your financial success because it gives you access to cash whenever you need it. Again, saving money is a way to raise enough money to start investing. However, if you only stop at saving money, you likely will never become rich. Most savings accounts offer interest rates that are less than the rate of inflation which means that the longer you save your money, the more value it losses.

For instance, if you had $100 in a savings account ten years ago, that $100 back then would have bought you a lot more than if you had that same $100 now because over time money can lose its purchasing power due to inflation. So you can see why you may never become wealthy through saving alone!

Investing on the other hand is an excellent way to build wealth because your assets have the ability to increase in value over time. One of the questions that many beginners have is where to invest their money so let’s answer that question now.