Hands up if the only financial “training” you had at school
was having access to the school bank where you could bring your money in every
week to save in your special blue book. Looking around now and seeing reports
about the level of personal debt people have, how many people are living beyond
their means and have no concept of budgeting, I wonder if the curriculum has
been missing something vital all these years.
Roy and I had a discussion the other night about our first
house, a small two bedroom terrace house which cost us £300 a month. We had no
gas, just electricity on a key meter. We didn’t have the internet or a land
line, we had mobiles (large mobiles!) and credit seemed to last forever. Our
council tax was £52 a month, our electricity £30 a month and we could do a
weekly shop on £40, easily.
Our bills have doubled, easily and there are many more
payments going out now than we had then. Our cost of living has risen sharply;
our incomes have of course increased but not as fast or as high as our
expenditures have. Fortunately for us we are and always have been quite savvy
when it comes to saving up etc; for young people starting out now it is much
harder. Prices are high, incomes are lower and jobs are less secure. I see so
many people setting up home, living on credit, above their incomes and not
realising how dire things are getting until it’s too late and they are
over-committed on credit.
Banks and private lenders have tightened the regulations on
borrowing but not tight enough and we are now faced with school leavers and
adults in a position where they simply don’t understand how to budget and live
within their means, who are over-committed on credit and for whom things have
spiralled out of control. The saddest thing of all? It’s avoidable!
I firmly believe that children should be taught from an
early age to understand the value of money, how to create a budget and stick to
it, to understand the danger of credit as well as the importance of savings. I
strongly believe that this is a topic that should be built into the national
curriculum and taught across the school years. Do you agree?
So far nearly 80,000 people have sign this petition, created
by Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert, to state that they do believe in
compulsory financial education in schools and want it in place asap. If you too
agree then please take a minute to sign.
Hard times come and go, how well you survive them depends on
how prepared you are when the storm hits.
