Fuck taxes and shit they need 2 weeks of Swahili

-Literally my school.

Important things I had to learn on my own in adulthood:

How to research and vet sources.

How to cook and clean.

Amoritization of loans (car and home) and agreements.

Rental agreements and the basics of contract law.

Student loans (the interests rate plus accrual of interest while your are in school).

Taxes - federal, state and local taxes. What their rates are and what they pay for etc..

Insurance (Health, Home, Renters, Car etc.)

Utilities - how they are calculated etc.

Credit cards, interest rates, late payment consequences etc.

Retirement Programs (pensions, IRA, 401K etc.). Investments, how they work, etc.

Basic home repair and remodeling (electrical, plumbing, etc.). Basic car care etc.

One of my young coworkers had been running a huge balance on her card for two years. She was making minimum payments every month and didnt understand why the number wasnt going down.....

I had to sit her down and explain how interest works and helped her figure out how to take a lower interest loan to wipe out the credit card debt and get a repayment plan going

I wonder what would have happened to her if i didnt overhear her phone conversation and decided to be nosy and ask her about the credit situation...

calculus

I'd say that about the first half of Calculus I was useful to me, taught concepts.

However, a lot of the rest of it, as well as most of the next two calculus classes I took, involved memorizing tricks to do symbolic integration by hand. That is, frankly, of limited use to even people who need to do symbolic integration.

I remember going by my calculus professor's husband's (another math professor) office once to deal with some project I was doing and some integration came up and he promptly threw it into Mathematica on his computer to do it. I commented on it and he said "yeah, I don't have time to spend doing these by hand".

My smartphone and computers have Maxima installed, a free and open-source computer algebra system capable of doing symbolic integration. I have that with me all the time. It's very rare that I need to do symbolic integration in the first place.

"But what if you don't have a calculator with you?"

Today, that's usually a smartphone, but same idea.

In my parent's generation, they taught people to manually compute square roots. It was some numerical approximation, don't know what they did exactly, probably something like "pick a number, divide, average result and divisor, repeat with average". They didn't bother to teach that by the time I was going to school. It was just expected that you'd use a calculator.

I remember reading Richard Feynman's book, about how he used to show off some mental math shortcuts (much more useful in an era before calculators).

I agree that memorizing certain mental math processes can be useful, but the time wasted on doing symbolic integration in calculus is still one of my major annoyances, looking back. There is no shortage of material in mathematics that is useful and could be in the curriculum, and instead we did symbolic integration.

Maybe curriculum has improved since then.

Going as planned. They want customers that carry balances, pay late fees, pay overdraft fees, etc.

Most people understand the math.

Very few people can delay gratification.

Discover is the best one I've ever had. No annual fee, started out with 0% interest for 18 months. I constantly get 0% balance transfer offers for 12 months, sure it costs a 3% one time fee, but it sure saves money on interest. Plus, their customer service and fraud dispute are the best imo.

Nerdwallet keeps track of whats currently available

I used Discover for a balance transfer. However, be sure you do the math. They have options like 0% interest rate with a 4% transfer fee to pay it off in 12 months. I chose instead 0% transfer fee with 5.99% APR over 15 months, but still plan to pay it off in 12 months.

The 4% transfer fee is on the entire balance as soon as you move it over... while the 5.99% interest is on your balance divided by 12 each month... which can get less and less each month depending on how much you pay off.

So for example... $5000 with 0% interest has a 4% transfer fee of $200. But $5000 with no transfer fee has 5.99% interest of around $25 for the first month, and less interest each month if you are paying chunks of your balance down every month. If you are not paying big chunks then the 0% interest with 4% transfer fee may be better.

It really depends on whether or not you plan on paying it off... and how fast you intend to do it. My previous interest was rising to 13% on one card, 19% on another... so 5.99% is much better for me.

That's what we have with debit cards.

It's often the other way around in yurop. Debit cards are free or cheap, credit cards aren't. Credit card scores aren't a thing. They mainly look at job status, income, savings, family money when considering giving a loan for house purchase. There are credit scores and blacklists, but it's more a background bank and government thing, not a game in your banking app.