N.p.r. News Burris in Afghanistan arriving today on an unannounced visit he's due to explore restarting talks with the Taliban that President Trump declared dead and pulling out some u.s. Forces from Afghanistan 3 u.s. Soldiers were killed today in a training accident at an Army base in Georgia 3 others are injured Georgia Public Broadcasting reports the accident happened at Fort Stewart near Savannah Georgia the Bradley fighting vehicle the soldiers were in was involved in a training accident according to a statement from the 3rd Infantry Division 3 were pronounced dead at the scene 3 others were taken to an Army hospital their names and further details about what happened have not been released the incident is under investigation the commanding general of the division called it a heartbreaking day and said our hearts and prayers go out to the families of those involved for n.p.r. News I'm Emily Jones in Savannah British Prime Minister Barak's Johnson says he still plans for the u.k. To leave the European Union by the end of the month though he's been forced to ask for a delay Vicki Barker reports from London even some of his closest colleagues suspect Boris Johnson secretly wants Britain to crash out of Europe without a deal on October 31st he's already said he'd rather be dead in a dish then ask for another extension that's why lawmakers passed an Act requiring Johnson to request that extension if there was no new Bragg's a deal approved by yesterday and why was there no new deal approved yesterday because even some M.P.'s who support Johnson's new deal don't trust him to follow through on all its details so they passed a 2nd motion insisting that final approval can only come after parliaments have a chance to vote in every little detail Johnson will make another attempt to get his new deal through parliament tomorrow for n.p.r. News I'm Vicki Barker in London this is n.p.r. . Crews in New Orleans have detonated controlled explosions to bring down 2 cranes they were precariously and dangerously perched at the side of a hotel that partially collapsed last week while under construction one crane is completely down the other is not rioting continues in Santiago Chile even though Chile's president says he's suspending a fare hike on public transport that trigger the protests page Sutherland reports the capital city is crippled damage estimates are up in the hundreds of millions from metro stations city buses stores and offices multiple fires were set across the city resulting in dozens of injured much of the subway system went up in flames and remains closed officials say it could take months to fix schools in Santiago and the neighboring towns are canceled for the early part of this week riots were also reported throughout the entire country the president is meeting with officials to figure out how to reverse the 4 percent fare hike that led to the chaos the protesters say the transit hike was just the last straw they're demanding more equality in health care education and salaries for n.p.r. News I'm paid Sutherland in Santiago deep sea researchers have found a Japanese aircraft carrier that went down in the Pacific during World War 2 historic Battle of Midway a turning point in the war scientists say they captured sonar images of the vessel today in deep waters halfway between the u.s. And Japan Barbara Kline n.p.r. News in Washington support for n.p.r. Comes from Ebsco celebrating 75 years of supporting libraries their communities and the role librarians play in making a difference learn more about Abscam dot com and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation . Dot org. A bunch of years ago I had just quit what I thought was my dream career trying to become a rock star and now I was trying to figure out what came next I was considering 3 options number one was to become a shrink I really liked psychology but in the end I decided I was too selfish to spend my days helping other people with their problems Number 2 was to become a financial advisor I really liked learning about saving and budgeting and investing but again I was selfish I didn't want to devote all my energy to other people's problems Number 3 was to become a writer and that's what I did but the other ideas didn't just go away there's at least a little bit of psychology in just about every episode of Freakonomics Radio As for the financial stuff well that's something we all wrestle with every day today on Freakonomics Radio will wrestle with it together we will wrestle with the standard advice on how much to save you have just told me to save 20 percent of my money you will wrestle with the fact that a financial windfall does not guarantee long term success we found at 15 percent. And will lay out a personal finance roadmap that anyone can follow. It's basically pretty simple avoid emotions and concentrate on economics. This is Freakonomics radio show that explores the hidden side of everything here's your host Stephen. Annamaria Lusardi is an economist who teaches in the business school at George Washington University I was born and raised in Milan and moved to the us about 25 years or so ago for my graduate studies as you can tell she still sounds a bit Mila Nisa I have to say I I cannot get rid of it these inside me when the study 1st moved to the States many things were unfamiliar or sports for instance especially American football I only became interested in football because everybody was watching football on Sunday so you know if I needed to talk to my friend we had to talk about football 1st and then when I met the football players then I had to you know be able to talk football seriously when she met the football players What's that all about well a few years back George Washington University started a special m.b.a. Program called Star that stands for special talent access and responsibility the program was designed for people who are already very successful they are often very wealthy and they have to manage many things you know and not just that well but also named the ticket. And it just so happened that most of the day students were actually at Leeds and the majority of at least were actually football players these were professional football players some of them were from the bottom or the events and I am of the more evidence fan they are 1st of all incredible students they are my favorite students why were they her favorites Lusardi found her athlete students incredibly disciplined and perhaps not surprisingly good team players She was also impressed with how charitable they were and she was charmed by their sheer size one day she was talking about the financing options of buying a car. The example she always used in previous classes was a Toyota Corolla but the football players all started giggling one student raised his hand professor and he said I do not fit into a Toyota Corolla Lusardi also realize that these n.f.l. Players were facing an unusual financial predicament these are people we chart a very talented very competent but they have no knowledge of how to monitor these money where often they come from a background where you know nobody has told them financially to receive. 'd 'd financial literacy is and has been for a couple decades Anna-Maria loose Artie's passion you know we make financial decisions every day and the financial the season that we make today are to defend the decision that our parents made our parents don't have to worry about pensions he don't face the type of mortgagees we face now we don't have probably all the credit cards and all of these consumer credit of their fingertips and also they didn't have student loans but we see other trends as well for example financial markets around the world have become more complex many economists for many years have assumed that most people are financially literate the traditional model easing the the you know I am model that predicts that people in a sense look ahead and dissipate they will write Tyurin any income will be lower in Therefore they save today in anticipation of those events in the future people understand the normal about trees about the products and the financial product available in the financial markets and make the best decision a court of the in their own preferences including that our version Tori sc. And so on so for example we assume that people know about interest compounding and the fact that if you save money today tweeted good all exponentially they interested 18 the future and they know all about the skin reste diversification and they act accordingly but how much do people really know about the most basic financial principles that is what Lusardi in collaboration with The Economist Olivia Mitchell set out to learn they came up with 3 survey questions this was actually that even by the fact that in the 1st survey we only had their own for 3 they piggyback their financial literacy questions on to the 2004 health and retirement study being limited to 3 questions turned out to be a blessing because 1st of all discussions are a very predictive but also because they are only 3 they were adopted in so many national surveys in the u.s. And then you know as many as 15 other counties around the world and more recently a variation of these questions and been added to our global survey so now we know about financial literacy around the world Ok before we hear about the state of financial literacy around the world let's hear the questions number one suppose you have $100.00 in a savings account endangered estate was 2 percent per year after 5 years how much do you think you would that be in the account if you left the money to grow the answers were multiple choice a more than $102.00 b. Exactly $102.00 c. Less than $102.00 or if you really want to play along Di I don't know and that could act ease the correct answer is a more than a $102.00. Because 2 percent interest on $100.00 in a year is $2.00 So after year one you have $102.00. And then over the remaining 4 years the interest grows on that $102.00 and so on and that is why compound interest has been called the 8th wonder of the world question one is about compound interest but really is about assessing Norman I see Ok question number 2 question 2 is about the inflation imagine that the interest rate on your savings account was one percent per year and inflation was still percent per year after one year how much would you be able to buy weed them on e in these account the answers a more than today be exactly the same as today see less than today or d. I don't know the answer is less than today because if you feel a showdown is 2 percent prices go up 2 percent but if you have only earn one percent in your saving account you basically can buy less and question number 3 Question 3 has to do about risk they've got to city case shown Do you think the following statement is true or false. Buying a single company stock usually provides a safe return in a stock more fun and true false and of course you can say do not all and the correct answer is true buying a single stock is safer than buying a mutual fund now just kidding that's false because a single company is a lot of the skier than a basket of stocks don't put all of your eggs in one basket Ok how do you do did you get all 3 right if so that would put you in a distinct minority Americans are not financially literate. That's right Lusardi found that only around 30 percent of the respondents got all 3 questions right the numbers are pretty similar around the world even in other rich countries in the us financial literacy has some distinct demographic differences those facing most challenges and Michel Roux are the young in the old women African-Americans Hispanics the least educated and those living in rural areas saw a national literacy should not be taken for granted and actually if you ask me I think we are at the krises level you might ask yourself if financial literacy is so important and if so many people are so bad at it what are we doing wrong. One simple answer is that even well educated people often don't attain as part of their formal education much of a basic financial literacy What about parents aren't they supposed to teach their kids the basics maybe but money being what it is a topic that makes a lot of people uncomfortable you can see how a lot of parents especially if they are not financially literate somehow never get around to teaching their kids some people argue that financial education isn't the answer anyway they say the main problem is that too many financial instruments are either too complicated or inherently exploitive we got into this debate in an earlier episode of Freakonomics Radio Here's the legal scholar Loren Willis on why it be better to design more user friendly financial instruments then to expect everyone to learn more about personal finance it's sort of like saying well we should start teaching everybody to be their own doctor teaching or want to be their own mechanic terribly inefficient to do that not only is it inefficient but it has a sort of culture of blaming the consumer you know you're the one who didn't figure this all out you you know didn't go to the classes or didn't pay attention or whatever and that's not going to help in the $100.00 Annamaria Lusardi does not share that view at George Washington she founded a research center called the Global Financial Literacy excellence center its mission is pretty obvious and part of that mission it turned out was to teach financial literacy to a bunch of pro football players whose circumstances she points out are quite a typical they are very young and they get all of the money that people earn in a lifetime early in life that's right as Lusardi writes a career lasting 6 years the median Ling. Will provide an n.f.l. Player with more earnings and an average college graduate will get in an entire lifetime plus a modest pension but they just couldn't translate that sum of money the long sound they had into the stream of money that could support of themselves throughout life BUSY. There are a lot of ways to blow a sudden fortune friends and family may come at you with their palms open you're pro-choice all sorts of advisers with all sorts of brilliant investment schemes there are taxes to pay upper income bracket taxes by the way which drink your net income by a lot and of course it's a lot more exciting to spend money today than to save it for tomorrow. Inspired by her current football students decided to gather some data on older players she and her colleagues looked at a cohort of n.f.l. Players who've been drafted in the late 1990 s. And early 2000 to assess their long term financial outcomes so we look at bankruptcy and other than other measures of financial distress because these are the things we can check in which studies they took and what they find we found at more or less 12 or intuit I tower made 15 percent declared bankruptcy that's right 15 percent of these guys who'd already earned a careers worth of income went bankrupt a rate that's similar or even higher than the overall population of men in their age group even though the n.f.l. Retirees that obviously earned a lot more money Lusardi also found that the risk didn't even decline for the players who earn the most to me they experience of the n.f.l. Is a good example of the a fact I'll fight illiteracy the n.f.l. Bankruptcy data reinforced Lusardi earlier findings about financial illiteracy so what's to be done because it's pretty obvious that many people have no idea how to handle their personal finances even people who would think should know even exceedingly well educated people like this guy I must say I had a very lackadaisical attitude about personal finance until I was about 40 years old it's Harold Pollack I'm a professor of social service and ministration at the University of Chicago Public Works with University of Chicago institutions like the crime lab and the Center for Health Administration studies I have a doctorate in public policy but I don't really apply that to finance but then something happened my mother in law died suddenly and my brother in law since and had to move into our home he's intellectually disabled and he was 340 pounds and had many related Chalo. Dj's Pollock's wife had to quit her job to take care of her brother and Pollock began to worry about their financial health and remember one day we had to buy a Lazy-Boy type chair just because he was so big that our furniture didn't work for him and it was like $900.00 for this chair and I just remember thinking like I'm just going to go through all my money and I became obsessed with personal finance he began looking at the literature on investing one of the 1st things I learned was that the conversation among real experts was actually a lot simpler than the conversation that you would get if you watched financial t.v. Or read brochures from financial services firms the people Pollack calls real experts academics typically who done real Imperial studies pulled a very different story then investment professionals I started to joke around that the fundamental problem that the industry face was that the best advice was available for free at the library Pollack started writing about these ideas on a blog called The reality based community for one piece he was interviewing the financial journalist Helaine Olen about a book she'd written called Pound Foolish Exposing the dark side of the personal finance industry and I said to her you know isn't the industry's fundamental problem that the best advice for most people would fit on an index card and it's available for free at the library and we kind of chuckled in the conversation moved on except that I started getting e-mails from people in comments on my blog saying hey where's the index card but there was no index card I was speaking metaphorically So of course I was kind of stuck but I had planted a flag and I felt I had done of that so I just reached into my kitchen drawer and I pulled out my daughter's 4 by 6 index card you know that she was using for school and I scribbled down and you know maybe 2 minutes 9 rules and I took a picture with my phone and I posted it on the web. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio Harold Pollack's index card catches fire on a variety of Web sites Boing Boing which I'd never heard of actually Life Hacker which I also have never heard of also a credit card rewards programs as good as they seem all the research suggests that these rewards programs just make you spend more money. Support comes from center health when it comes to the opioid epidemic anyone can get help century caregivers offer support from prevention to harm reduction censuring dot org slash recovery. You're listening to Colorado Public Radio My name's Natalia Navarro I am the morning reporter here at c.p.r. News I'm joined by Colorado matters producer Xandra McMahon how you do in a net today we are asking for your support this is community funded c.p.r. News and you can give quickly and easily a c.p.r. Dot org We're asking you to do that today at c.p.r. 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