Expatria Department of Education
Have you ever wondered why students don't learn about personal finance or investing in school? It seems a bit ridiculous - how are we supposed to expect the next generation to operate in society if they don't even learn how to do their taxes? Or how interest, let alone the compounding type, works? It's not a big secret why though, at least if you think about it. If kids at school learned how money works, how to save it, how to spend it responsibly, many would come home and ask Mom and Dad 'why are we so poor'?
I mean, Mom and Dad, after 10+ years working, why are we living paycheck to paycheck? How much do you have in your 401k? When did you start accruing compound interest on your investments? Why didn't we buy a used car, instead of this over-priced new one? How long until you retire?
Parents don't usually talk about money in a detailed way like this with their kids, either because they don't have much money to talk about or because they don't know anything about it themselves. Government schools don't teach this because its inherently unstable to have a financially aware bunch of school age children - what if they start investing early, build good financial habits & retire in their 30's or 40's without spending money on frivolous bullshit? What would happen to our consumption based economy?
Government schools won't teach you personal finance because it doesn't really benefit them for you to learn it. If you master personal finance, the next step might be for you to figure out how to pay less in taxes - now they are really upset.
The Expatria Department of Education's mission is to teach it's citizens the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in this world we live in, instead of simply settling into being a cog within the machine. Whether it's technical skills such as software engineering, or more earthly domains such as basic plumbing, our goal is to make our citizens more informed, self-sufficient and exceptional.
We approach creating educational products from first principles - we try to understand, given a particular subject, what are the skills or information that is the critical 20% of knowledge that will give you 80% of the results you need; Pareto-weighted curriculums, in other words.
Our first product is the 'developer starter pack', an interactive workbook for aspiring software engineers that will focus on helping them acquire the mentality, habits and institutional knowledge that modern software engineers possess. Outside of the domain of writing code, which is something only attained through sheer hours of effort, we focus on helping you learn the fundamentals of adjacent disciplines such as UX Research and Design, to help you be a valuable member of a cross-functional team. We teach you the basics of operating within a 'Scrum'-based methodology of software development, which most teams use nowadays for better or worse. We help you develop the concept, data model and business logic for your first portfolio product, that will get your foot in the door at a company by building something genuinely impressive, useful and something you can be proud of.
The workbook is available for pre-order for $99; if you don't see a payment link below, that means as of November 13th 2024 we are still setting up our eCommerce implementation for this product. You can in the meantime email us at michael@expatriaonline.com for a temporarily more manual solution to order your copy.