Teenagers have more spending power than ever before, and the ability to easily purchase what they want with just a few taps on their phones.
An estimated 42 percent of U.S. teens use TikTok Shop, 39 percent rely on credit or debit cards, and 33 percent lean on mobile payments like CashApp and Apple Pay to make personal purchases, according to 2025 data. And increasingly, teens have a say in big family purchases like cars, vacations, and college tuition, say experts. But that doesn’t mean they’re prepared to spend, or save, wisely.
Recent research bears this out. A 2025 survey conducted by Wakefield Research of a nationally representative sample of 1,000 U.S. teens ages 13 to 18 revealed some big gaps in their financial literacy. For instance, close to half of teens surveyed believe an interest rate of 18 percent on debt is “manageable” and can be paid off over time.
And when they receive money, only about one-third of teen respondents said they save some of it for their future—despite nearly half of them reporting being “terrified” they won’t have enough money to cover their future needs and goals.
But their ideas about how to make money aren’t necessarily realistic, educators say.
“Students all want to know how to get rich quick. And they often think that if they go to college, they will automatically be able to afford the standard of living that their parents have provided to them. They don’t usually see the years of work and saving that went into building up that standard of living,” said Kerri Herrild, a business teacher at Wisconsin’s De Pere High School who’s been teaching a personal finance class to 11th and 12th graders for the past 21 years.
A growing number of teachers will soon be joining Herrild in educating high school students on personal finance. In March, Kentucky became the 27th state to require a personal finance course as a graduation requirement for the state’s public school students.
Within the last five years, the number of states with personal finance course graduation requirements has tripled, according to Tim Ranzetta, co-founder of Next Gen Personal Finance, a nonprofit that advocates for financial literacy education.
Teens are increasingly spending money in risky ways
Topics such as banking, budgeting, college and career plans, saving, and investing have long been expected parts of personal finance curricula at the high school level. But teens’ growing purchasing power and their propensity to take risks in their spending habits make personal finance an even higher-priority subject in high school these days, experts say.
Online gambling tops the list of risky new ways of teen spending. It’s unclear exactly how many teens have taken to online gambling, but a meta-analysis published in a 2024 issue of The Lancet Public Health reported that, globally, more than 1 in 6 adolescents surveyed had gambled in the past 12 months—including on commercial, and largely age-restricted, websites. Researchers found the rates of gambling among young people in North America even higher, with about 33 percent reporting having gambled in the past 12 months.
Child-health and anti-gambling advocates blame the uptick in online gambling on a landmark 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave states the power to legalize sports betting. As of February 2025, online sports betting is available in 30 states.
And while most of those states set the minimum sports gambling age at 21, with some jurisdictions setting the age limit at 18, those restrictions are often easy to bypass, said Ranzetta.
His nonprofit Next Gen Personal Finance created a mini-unit on gambling in response to teacher requests for it.
In one state, a 16-year-old championed personal finance education
Teachers and students have been actively advocating for states to include personal finance in their graduation requirements, said Ranzetta, who described dedicated teachers taking groups of students to related legislative hearings.
“When you have students and teachers testify to the power and impact of the course, on a very personal level, I think it makes a lot of sense,” he said.
Perhaps no student has been as persuasive in pushing for personal finance curriculum as Patrick Graboviy, a 16-year-old junior at North Oldham High School in Goshen, Ky., who spearheaded efforts to get his state to adopt a personal finance requirement.
An internship with the Kentucky Financial Empowerment Commission, a statewide nonprofit promoting financial education, introduced Patrick to the value of personal finance education and allowed him to spend time with younger children whom he said had no concept of healthy spending and saving habits, which both worried and ignited him.
“I took on this project because I am passionate about bringing the American dream to everyone, and people can only be empowered to get the American dream when they are financially independent,” Patrick wrote in an email.
Patrick’s ambition vaulted him to a position as a U.S. Senate page, allowing him to spend a semester in Washington, where he learned about the legislative process. Around that time, he also met Kentucky state Rep. Michael Meredith, a Republican and the sponsor of legislation that would require a financial literacy course in 11th or 12th grade.
Patrick ended up testifying in favor of the bill, which passed and was signed into law this March. It will go into effect in the 2026-27 school year.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but I think a personal finance class is more beneficial than an elective film class,” he said.
Surveys show support for personal finance classes
While most American adults believe parents should be teaching their kids about personal finance—according to a national representative sample of nearly 4,000 U.S. adults surveyed in 2022—not all parents have a strong grasp of personal finance, and polls show support among parents for their kids to be taught healthy fiscal habits in school.
In a 2022 survey by Motley Fool, a financial services company, 38 percent of parents said their family didn’t sufficiently educate them on investing, and 46 percent reported not being adequately educated on personal finance in school.
Eighty-eight percent of adults in a 2022 survey by the National Endowment for Financial Education agreed that their state should require either a semester- or year-long financial education course for high school graduation, and most said they would like to have taken such a class as teenagers.
“I think there’s a growing understanding that if we don’t teach this in school, they’re going to learn from social media,” said Ranzetta. “And that means they might spend a couple hours on YouTube and look up investing videos—and I will tell you the most popular ones are those that talk about how to make a million dollars as a day trader.”
