Financial fishing

I'm reminded of those "scam" warning emails that do the rounds. They are 99.999% of the time hoaxes. But it's the motivation of people who pass them on. You can't, in my mind, learn every single scam in the book. You have to learn general skills in awareness and reason to avoid scams, because for every scam you learn, there are 1000 different ways dishonest people (in conjunction with your own stupidity) can catch you out. Even if these scare stories are true, they are unlikely to help as fraudsters have probably moved on to a new trick by now, general life skils not awareness of specifics are in order.



I think financial awareness is a similar thing. It is just an application of the sort of skills you learn in science, english and maths. Science teaches you to view the world systematically and through that teaches reasoning skills, English teaches literacy and the ability to take in information and understand it, maths, well basic numeracy.



You know the addage of "give a man a fish... teach a man to fish".I think getting the basics of literacy, numeracy and reasoning are "teach a man to fish" whereas teaching financial tips.