Financial Education: What We Are Getting Wrong
We are living through a financial education crisis.
Not because information is scarce. Quite the opposite. We are surrounded by financial content, advice, tutorials, charts, strategies, and promises — all available instantly, at the click of a screen.
The problem is not access. The problem is how financial education has been distorted by speed, algorithms, and the illusion of simplicity.
Between 2024 and 2026, a strong consensus emerged across global institutions, economists, and policymakers: traditional financial education models are no longer aligned with how people consume information, how markets work, or how financial decisions compound over time.
This article synthesizes the most influential global thinking on financial education — and confronts the uncomfortable reality of what it has become.
The Age of Financial “Quick Pills”
We live in an era of instant gratification.
Financial education has not been immune.
Today, many people are not looking to understand finance. They are looking for fast answers, shortcuts, and ready-made formulas — preferably condensed into a 30-second video.
Education has been replaced by consumption.
From studying finance to scrolling finance
Complex processes that once required time, reading, and reflection are now reduced to:
- “Buy this ETF”
- “This crypto did 300%”
- “I made €10,000 last month”
- “This strategy works every time”
The implicit message is always the same:
If it worked for me, it must work for you.
Understanding, analysis, risk assessment, and context quietly disappear.
The Clickbait Economy of Financial Advice
Social media platforms reward visibility, not accuracy.
As a result, financial content increasingly follows the logic of clickbait:
- Results without process
- Returns without risk
- Success without probability
Young “financial influencers” — often with no formal education, limited experience, and unverifiable track records — present themselves as near-millionaires thanks to their investments.
Many record their videos from their childhood bedrooms.
Others copy strategies almost verbatim from creators in different languages or platforms, repackaging them as original insight.
Yesterday they were explaining how to win at a video game. Today they explain how to buy a specific crypto, trade options, or allocate your life savings into an ETF.
The format changes. The authority does not improve.
The Dangerous Illusion of “Proven” Strategies
One of the most harmful ideas propagated online is this:
“This worked for others, therefore it will work for you.”
Global financial education research consistently shows why this reasoning fails.
Why copying outcomes is not education
- Different time horizons
- Different risk tolerance
- Different capital structures
- Different macroeconomic conditions
What worked for someone else at a specific moment says little about what will work for you now.
Yet social platforms incentivize exactly this type of storytelling: highlight the outcome, hide the context.
What Was Lost: The Slow Skills of Financial Thinking
In the race for immediacy, something essential has been abandoned.
Financial education used to mean:
- Reading and interpreting data
- Understanding risk-return trade-offs
- Analyzing trends over time
- Accepting uncertainty
- Making decisions without guarantees
These skills are slow. They are uncomfortable. They do not produce viral content.
But they are precisely what protect individuals from catastrophic financial mistakes.
When Financial Education Becomes Entertainment
The transformation of financial education into entertainment has consequences.
Many people no longer follow the basic rule consistently emphasized by regulators and educators worldwide:
Only invest money you can afford to lose.
Instead, fueled by extraordinary returns advertised online and the pressure of “falling behind,” individuals:
- Invest emergency savings
- Overconcentrate portfolios
- Take risks they do not understand
The dream being sold is seductive:
“Financial freedom before 30.”
What is rarely shown is survivorship bias, failed attempts, or long periods of underperformance.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
Financial decisions today shape decades of future outcomes.
Pensions are increasingly individual. Housing costs are high. Markets are volatile. Responsibility has shifted from institutions to individuals.
Reducing financial education to social media advice is not just naive — it is dangerous.
This is precisely why global institutions now emphasize:
- Critical thinking over tips
- Process over outcomes
- Risk awareness over promised returns
The Real Financial Education Revolution
The real revolution is not about banning content or demonizing platforms.
It is about restoring financial education to what it was always meant to be:
- Slow enough to be understood
- Rigorous enough to be trusted
- Honest enough to include failure
Education is not entertainment. And finance is not a game.
The New Definition of Financial Literacy
Financial literacy is the ability to make informed decisions under uncertainty, resist behavioral traps, and understand risk — not the ability to copy someone else’s results.
This definition aligns with the direction taken by:
- World Economic Forum – Financial Literacy
- OECD – Financial Education
- Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center
- World Bank – Financial Consumer Protection
- Financial Times – Financial Literacy
Financial freedom is not built on shortcuts.
It is built on understanding, discipline, and time — three things no algorithm can compress.
A Personal Note on Expertise, Experience, and Financial Education
I would like to close this article with a personal reflection.
I have worked as a financial consultant for more than 20 years. During that time, I have participated in hundreds of projects for large international companies, often under the label of “expert.”
The reality is more nuanced.
On many occasions, my role as a supposed expert involved studying a topic for a few days — sometimes only hours — before presenting conclusions to employees who had been working in that area for years. This is not a confession of incompetence; it is an honest description of how consulting often works.
A consultant’s true value rarely lies in deep operational mastery. It usually lies elsewhere:
- An external, uncontaminated perspective
- Distance from internal politics and rivalries
- A structured methodology to analyze problems
Practical, hands-on knowledge is often limited. Yet the role requires you to sell certainty, clarity, and authority.
I know very well what it means to appear to be an expert.
The uncomfortable truth about “business gurus”
I have always believed that if a consultant were truly an exceptional manager or strategist, it would not be difficult for them to build one or several successful businesses using their own money.
In reality, most consultants remain salaried professionals — often well paid, but still salaried — operating under the umbrella of large firms.
This does not make them dishonest. But it does reveal a limitation.
Many so-called business “gurus” are excellent theorists. Far fewer have proven their ideas in the real world, with their own capital at risk, under real uncertainty, over long periods of time.
This distinction matters enormously in financial education.
Why real experience matters in finance
Finance is not a theoretical exercise. It is cumulative, probabilistic, emotional, and unforgiving.
Advice given without having lived through market cycles, mistakes, drawdowns, and long periods of patience is incomplete — no matter how polished it sounds.
For this reason, I made a personal decision years ago: I would not advise others on building passive income until I had done it myself, over time, with transparent numbers and real risk.
From theory to practice
Only after achieving my own financial freedom — by managing and structuring my passive income streams — did I feel ethically comfortable offering guidance to others.
That journey required years of learning, testing, adjusting, and documenting results.
It led to the development of my own methodology and investment framework, including the SPI approach applied to P2P crowdlending, supported by real performance data and lived experience.
The reasons behind SPI are explained in detail in Why I Created the SPI Method.
Only then did advising others stop being theoretical and start being responsible.
Financial education deserves less performance and more proof.
Less noise, and more lived experience.
Less imitation, and more understanding.
That is the standard I believe financial education — and financial advice — should be held to.
