Debt Heads Minis is a collection of work-in-progress vignettes on the topic of debt (duh) that we’ll be sharing here while we work on our official series, and more crucially, while we work to secure funding to sustain the full-time production of that series.
Thanks to a grant we won last year, we have successfully completed a full pilot episode (!) and are currently at work on episodes two, three, four … (!!)
If you like what you’ve seen and heard so far, it’s never been a better time to join our community and support this work by becoming a paid subscriber!
Of all the things Debt Heads co-hosts Jamie Feldman and Rachel Webster find lacking in their years of education, personal finance feels the most glaringly obvious.
As Jamie remembers it — “It did not exist in my school. It did not exist in my home. And a non-scientific survey of most people I know, including most of the people we’ve interviewed for our podcast, reveals it wasn’t in their schools or homes, either.”
In fact, as of April 2023 there was just one personal finance course, taught in the entire New York City public school system. And it's an elective.
There are many things… many of us don’t know.
We don’t know how to budget.
We don’t know how to balance a checkbook. Some of us don’t know how to write a check.
We don’t know how credit works – even though we’re told we need it to do things like rent an apartment, have a car or exist.
And what we don’t know can hurt us. At least financially. According to a report released earlier this year, 38% of Americans said lack of financial literacy cost them at least $500 in 2022. Some went so far as to say it cost them up to $10,000.
This week, in part four of our four-part “How did you get into so much debt?” series, Jamie breaks down all the ways she was not prepared for financial life.
Debt Heads Minis: What we don't know can hurt us