I guess it depends on your idea of minimum necessary savings. When i know i intend to make a large purchase (car/house) i start setting aside a large chunk of money years in advance.

I never pay interest on my credit cards anyway, and i was shocked to find out a lot of people don't pay the balance off every month to avoid accumulating interest.

There's a serious revamp that needs to happen to middle school and high school education that would incorporate basic financial literacy and an introduction to savings vehicles which are all different in their respective countries. There's people our age duff that don't know what a TFSA is and are tossing their money in GICs.

It's a lack of education and honestly the system has failed. There should be individual responsibility but education needs to atleast develop a basic foundation to know that things exist to begin with.

I have always maintained on here I would pay higher taxes for better education for upcoming youth. I'll pay for revamp now proactivly or pay it later when the gov't needs to bail out companies again due to mass defaults. I'd much rather be proactive.

Some old saying that goes with this, something like give a man some food he will eat for a day teach him to farm he will eat for a lifetime. Something like that.

This post was edited by SBD on Sep 4 2020 05:22pm