I don't think you need a deep resume in the financial industry nor a long education to be better off than most of the population. Those things can help for sure.
But financial literacy comes really from media literacy, asking basic questions of who is telling you something, what is their track record, who are they paid by, what are they selling and what other people say about what they say. Too many people simply react to emotions and look for confirmation bias. Also, one needs to distinguish between analysis and justification.
There's opportunities for this every day. It can be as simple as asking what a bank does or how mortgages work. You'll quickly get to a point of asking what fractional reserves are, what the FDIC does and how the government keeps banks solvent.
You then look at what a currency is and how currencies have evolved over time. The early history of currencies can largely be derived from first principles.
Example: in primitive societies, people migrated and followed food. As time went on they'd start to specialize and have excess goods and you'd end up with barter systems, even more so once you had agriculture and you started to see permanent settlements. But bartering is inefficient. You might have the leather that I want but you don't want the cheese that I have. Maybe you'll take it because you can trade it, maybe not.
So people started trading in things that they assigned value to eg silver and, later, gold. It's important to note that this value is "assigned" because, beyond jewelry, gold didn't have a lot of early utility. It has useful properties, like it's inert, fungible, divisible and hard-to-counterfeit (because of it's density).
But dealing in gold itself is awkward so political entities started creating currencies. There were IOUs and contracts but currencies eventually became a promise to exchange it for gold, if requested, by some political entity.
And this really takes us into the 20th century where countries issued currencies and they backed those with gold reserves, literally thousands of tons of gold.
It quickly gets a lot more complex from there as 50+ years ago we ended up with fiat currencies, meaning the value is set by markets instead of an agreed upon exchange rate.
You have people who think abandoning the gold standard was a mistake, often called "goldbugs". Many goldbugs moved to crypto. You can see why: the idea is that the supply of Bitcoin (or whatever) is predetermined. You can't just "print money" (they say). The truth of printing money is more complex. A big problem is the US consistently runs a trade deficit.
I'm not sure how helpful that all is. Just some random thoughts.
But financial literacy comes really from media literacy, asking basic questions of who is telling you something, what is their track record, who are they paid by, what are they selling and what other people say about what they say. Too many people simply react to emotions and look for confirmation bias. Also, one needs to distinguish between analysis and justification.
There's opportunities for this every day. It can be as simple as asking what a bank does or how mortgages work. You'll quickly get to a point of asking what fractional reserves are, what the FDIC does and how the government keeps banks solvent.
You then look at what a currency is and how currencies have evolved over time. The early history of currencies can largely be derived from first principles.
Example: in primitive societies, people migrated and followed food. As time went on they'd start to specialize and have excess goods and you'd end up with barter systems, even more so once you had agriculture and you started to see permanent settlements. But bartering is inefficient. You might have the leather that I want but you don't want the cheese that I have. Maybe you'll take it because you can trade it, maybe not.
So people started trading in things that they assigned value to eg silver and, later, gold. It's important to note that this value is "assigned" because, beyond jewelry, gold didn't have a lot of early utility. It has useful properties, like it's inert, fungible, divisible and hard-to-counterfeit (because of it's density).
But dealing in gold itself is awkward so political entities started creating currencies. There were IOUs and contracts but currencies eventually became a promise to exchange it for gold, if requested, by some political entity.
And this really takes us into the 20th century where countries issued currencies and they backed those with gold reserves, literally thousands of tons of gold.
It quickly gets a lot more complex from there as 50+ years ago we ended up with fiat currencies, meaning the value is set by markets instead of an agreed upon exchange rate.
You have people who think abandoning the gold standard was a mistake, often called "goldbugs". Many goldbugs moved to crypto. You can see why: the idea is that the supply of Bitcoin (or whatever) is predetermined. You can't just "print money" (they say). The truth of printing money is more complex. A big problem is the US consistently runs a trade deficit.
I'm not sure how helpful that all is. Just some random thoughts.