Twelve Years and Not One Lesson on Money

**Important Disclaimer:** The financial concepts, strategies, and perspectives shared in this course are for educational purposes only and reflect Josh Felts' personal experiences and learnings. This course does not constitute financial, tax, legal, or investment advice. Tax laws, investment regulations, and financial strategies vary by jurisdiction and individual circumstance. Always consult qualified financial, tax, and legal professionals before making financial decisions. The goal of this course is to build financial literacy and shift your relationship with money — not to prescribe specific financial actions.

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You spent twelve years in school. Possibly sixteen or more if you went to college. You learned the quadratic formula. You learned the causes of World War I. You learned how to dissect a frog.

And in all of that time, in all of those years, in all of those classrooms — nobody taught you how money actually works.

Not how to create it. Not how to keep it. Not how to make it grow. Not how to protect it from the people and systems designed to take it from you.

This is not an accident.

**Why the School System Doesn't Teach Financial Literacy**

I want to be careful here, because I am not a conspiracy theorist. But I am someone who has thought deeply about this question, and the answer I keep coming back to is this: the school system was designed to produce employees, not entrepreneurs. Workers, not owners. People who know how to follow instructions, not people who know how to build wealth.

An employee who understands money is harder to keep underpaid. A person who understands how wealth is built is less likely to spend their entire life trading time for a salary. A financially literate population is, in many ways, a more demanding population — one that asks harder questions and accepts fewer of the default arrangements that keep the current economic structure in place.

I am not saying this to make you angry. I am saying this to make you aware. Because awareness is the first step to doing something different.

**The ADHD Angle**

I want to add something personal here. For someone with ADHD, the school system's failure to teach financial literacy is especially costly.

Here is why: the ADHD brain is naturally impulsive. It seeks immediate reward over delayed gratification. It struggles with abstract concepts that don't have immediate, tangible feedback. Money — especially the long-term, compound, patient kind of money — is one of the most abstract, delayed-gratification concepts there is.

So when you combine a brain wired for impulsivity with zero financial education, you get exactly what happened to me in my early twenties: I was making money, and I had no idea how to keep it, grow it, or protect it. I was earning at a high level and still feeling financially stressed because I had never learned the fundamentals.

The system failed me twice: once by not teaching me how money works, and once by not teaching me how to work with the specific way my brain processes decisions.

**What This Course Is**

This course is the financial education you should have received at 16. It is the conversation your parents should have had with you but probably didn't — not because they didn't care, but because nobody had it with them either.

We are going to cover how money is actually created, what assets and liabilities really mean, how the tax system works (and how to work with it), how cash flow determines your financial reality, and how to build a financial life that creates freedom instead of stress.

This is not a get-rich-quick course. This is a get-financially-literate course. And financial literacy, applied consistently over time, is one of the most reliable paths to wealth that exists.