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Life Kit

Avoid these common financial mistakes

Life Kit

NPR

Kids & Family, Business, Self-improvement, Education, Health & Fitness

4.33.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Personal finance can be a tricky subject to navigate. There's a lot of conflicting guidance on which savings account to use, how to budget properly and where to invest your money. And it's easy to make a mistake. This episode, financial educator Yanely Espinal shares the common financial mistakes she wish she knew about earlier. This episode originally published August 6, 2024.

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Transcript

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1:24.5

You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

1:30.6

I want to start this episode by saying, we have all made financial mistakes.

1:36.1

Janelli Espinal is a financial educator.

1:38.6

She works at a nonprofit called NextGen Personal Finance, which is on a mission to try to get every single high school student in America,

1:46.3

guaranteed access to a semester course about personal finance and financial literacy.

1:50.8

Ten years ago, she was deep in credit card debt and counting down the days until she was going to pay it off.

1:56.7

In October of 2015, I was going to make my last credit card payment.

...

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