A complaint I hear a lot from my millennial peers is that our parents didn’t teach us enough about money. I can say that personal finance wasn’t dinner table conversation in my house, and even as I went off to college and started fending for myself, it was almost a taboo subject. When it came to money, people either had it or they didn’t, and you definitely didn’t talk about it.

Maybe this is why the average American isn’t exactly fluent in personal finance, and the situation is getting worse . Americans can only answer about 50 percent of basic questions about borrowing, savings, and risk on a financial literacy survey, according to a 2026 study by TIAA , a retirement services company. About a third of those surveyed said they have a hard time making ends meet and are debt-constrained.…