Financial Literacy Begets Financial Freedom

In El Salvador, seven-year-olds learn about money.

“But that’s too young!” some will say, “children don’t need to know such things.”

And I won’t blame you if that’s your initial reaction. Kids must be shielded, must be allowed to be kids. They don’t need to concern themselves with the many bureaucracies we have bestowed upon ourselves in the world of grown-ups.

But financial education is not about building a stock portfolio. In fact, that line of thinking is what got us into the status quo in the first place. We subconsciously equate learning about money with learning how to make money. Yet financial education is not about getting rich quickly, quite the opposite: it’s about not getting poor slowly.

Our goal for the children of El Salvador is financial freedom. By that, I don’t mean riches. I mean the freedom that comes with using money consciously and not having your finances hang over your head day and night like a dark cloud. Money should never control you.

That’s why this year, we launched the world’s first financial education program for primary school students aged seven to thirteen.

What Is Money?

The title is simple because the goal is simple: guide the kids to a point at which they can answer this very question even many adults can’t answer.We began working on the What Is Money? series in early 2024. It is crafted in the style of The Little HODLer, a comic brand I created in 2021. Simplifying complex subject matters has always been my strong suit. I create comics catered to an audience not unlike myself: we’re not the most technical people under the sun, but we, too, use money, and we, too, want to own our money.

In five schoolbooks over the course of five years, public school students now learn about money. We cover the history of money, starting with the era of bartering and making stops at Mesoamerican cacao commodity money, Lydian gold coins, Chinese paper notes, the Salvadoran colón, the dollar, and Bitcoin.

We tackle the various concepts that surround money: the juxtaposition of that which is valuable and that which is expensive. The different types of value and how we determine them. The various components that make up the price of products. How to build a budget. How grown-ups earn money and the types of jobs kids might pursue in the future.

Few people believe me when I tell them we can quite effortlessly help children understand the concept of inflation and even the Cantillon Effect, facts of life that affect them directly but are often kept from them way into their adult life.

Kids in El Salvador will understand money to a level at which they’ll have the confidence to not just earn and spend it, but use it with self-control and consideration.

No other country in the world currently does this. El Salvador is the first, and I maintain that we should commend a nation’s pursuit of financial literacy for its people in a world that sorely lacks such initiatives.

The El Salvador Effect

From my very first visit to El Salvador, I knew I would move here. In my life traveling the world I have never seen a country with such potential.

More yet, Salvadorans are an optimistic people, known for their smiles and positive spirits, and today more than ever I am convinced El Salvador is on the cusp of its very own Golden Age.

To me as an entrepreneur, it was a no-brainer to move here, mostly for two reasons:

First, I feel welcome. If you respect the customs of the Salvadoran people and bring ideas to support the country’s growth, this nation and all its currents will conspire to help you achieve your goals. This becomes a symbiotic relationship: El Salvador allows you to self-actualize, and your self-actualization becomes a piece of a puzzle bigger than all of us.

Second, and this might sound a little romantic, but we have only one life, and we must choose wisely how to spend it. The decision where to build our existence, where to invest our time, resources, and talents, is crucial. I feel a responsibility to contribute my small part somewhere it has staying power, somewhere I can see its purpose, somewhere it actually does something. To me, that place is El Salvador.

The other day, we were planning our tour through El Salvador to visit different schools and observe the pilot classes for the What Is Money? project, when in a random burst of inspiration, I suggested we could renovate a classroom in one of the newly rebuilt schools under El Salvador’s Dos escuelas por día program.

That same day, I suggested to Stacy that we could bring educational material to the school’s multipurpose room, build a reading corner and a small library, and provide different offers for the students to spend their breaks and afternoons. All we needed was the OK from the school and some funding from a private donor.

That same day, the project was approved.

I’m telling you this because I believe this is how progress happens. Not through the bureaucratic over-complication of all the things, but through common sense and good intentions.

Or, as Stacy likes to say, you can just do things.