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March 29, 2012 at 09:24 AM
When Jeff Rose spoke with soon-to-be college graduates at his alma mater, out of the crowd of 50, not one hand was raised when they were queried about whether they had ever heard of a Roth IRA.
That not one person out of 50 understood how Roth IRA worked would have been a staggering enough statistic, but not one person had ever even heard of one. Especially after the economic crisis, but in some places well before, there was sense of worry that young people were graduating college without the proper knowledge needed to build and manage healthy finances for themselves. Many colleges and even high schools throughout the U.S. have instituted mandatory financial literacy courses to combat these problems, which run the gamut from learning how to write a check to the rudiments of retirement planning.
Rose, a certified financial planner and CEO of Alliance Wealth Management turned to social media to voice his frustration: “What’s wrong with this picture? I polled 50 soon-to-be graduating college seniors if they knew what a Roth IRA was. The result: Zero,” he tweeted.
