Understanding the Issues: Education

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by Mattyk72

100%? No. But I'm not going to even venture a guess or try to assign a percentage as to how much your environment and upbringing contributes. I would say that it's very critical though.

And I would say if people are not willing to take 100% responsibility for their actions and decisions, and instead choose to place blame on others, they're not worth helping.

Anyone who recognizes that their actions put them in a bad situation, they've probably learned from it. And I'm all for helping them. Take the mortgage crisis. If people weren't properly educated by lenders that their payments will increase in 5 years when the adjustable term expires, and they now realize that they needed to ask more questions and be more scrutinizing when acquiring financing, then I'm all for helping to bail them out. But if people want to point fingers at the lenders and call themselves a victim, that indicates a person who is likely to repeat the same mistake.

In order to truly learn from a bad decision, you have to recognize the ways in which you could have prevented the bad decision from being made. In the case of mortgages, the realization has to be that next time I'm going to be mindful of all the ways in which my monthly payment can potentially change.