The Trouble with Financial Literacy

The author on the right, age 5

I’ve shared often that a large part of my childhood and much of my twenties were spent in poverty. I’d say poverty ended for me at age 30, when I took my first professional job as a second-grade teacher, making $25,600 a year. That wasn’t wealth, but it was enough to start building stability because it exceeded my bills.

Shortly after I started teaching, we found out we’d be having a baby the following fall. It hit me in some places I didn’t expect. When my daughter was born, I was already working as a teacher. I had relative stability, not necessarily abundance, but enough consistency to pay the bills and know the lights would stay on. It was only after finding that fragile but real stability that financial literacy started to make sense and feel urgent. It felt like I needed to understand money in new ways, and I felt ashamed that I didn’t already.

I remember wanting to understand more: how to build credit, how to plan for her future, how to make the most of the modest income I had. It was a powerful moment of transformation. And like so many people who go through that shift, I began to think that financial literacy was the reason I was “making it.”

That belief stayed with me for a long time. It stayed with me well into the early years of my career in adult education leadership. I designed workshops and lessons that included budgeting tips, credit management, and savings strategies. I sincerely thought that understanding money was one of the missing links for people struggling with poverty. I had lived through poverty, after all, or at least one version of it. I must know what works, and I was sure it was about understanding money.

But the more I worked with students, families, and communities facing chronic instability, the more I started to see the cracks in that assumption. The truth was, the shift in my life hadn’t come because I suddenly understood compound interest or learned how to budget. The shift came because I had finally begun earning enough to have a little margin. That modest but consistent income as a teacher was the game-changer. Financial literacy didn’t pull me out of poverty… it just made more sense once I was no longer stuck in it.

And that’s the part we often miss when we hold up financial literacy as the answer to poverty. It’s not that financial literacy is inherently bad, it’s that it is often mistimed and misapplied. Telling someone who can’t cover basic needs to “budget better” isn’t just unhelpful, it’s insulting. It frames poverty as a personal failure instead of a systemic outcome.

I get frustrated because I’ve come to see many people who live in poverty are already incredibly financially literate, just not in the way middle-class frameworks define it. They know how to stretch a dollar across competing priorities. They know how to navigate benefit cliffs, juggle rent with car repairs, and time a payday loan to cover a shortfall. They can tell you the price of milk at four different stores and how much gas it takes to get to each one. These are not people who need to be taught how money works. They are living inside an entirely different financial system, one most people never see up close.

Financial literacy, in its best form, is useful. But it is not liberation. It is not a substitute for a living wage, stable housing, or affordable health care. In my own life, it became valuable after I had stability. It gave me a sense of control, and it helped me build on a foundation that already existed. But it was not the foundation itself.

We must stop pretending that we can budget our way out of poverty. We must stop offering individual behavior fixes for structural problems. The cake is stability, income, housing, and opportunity. Financial literacy is the frosting, helpful, even beautiful, but not the thing that holds it all together.

So yes, teach financial literacy. Offer it with empathy, not judgment. Frame it as an opportunity, not a solution. And most importantly, do it in tandem with real investments in equity and access. Because what people need most isn’t a class on money. What they need is enough; enough income, enough support, enough dignity to exhale and begin building a life with choices.