If you’re 18 and you’re given a credit card, well you’re going to spend the money. When you see 10% or so coming out of your salary into a pension scheme you’re going to think, hey, come on that’s 40 years away, I want to spend it now, I may not be here in 40 years. Parents and grandparents who save for their children often say ‘I don’t want them to get their hands on it. they’ll just blow it’. Yes, some will, but they’ll never know better unless we start to have personal finance, as well as sex, education at school. We did, in my day, have ‘citizenship courses’, but they were there to fill the time after exams and before summer hols. There has to be some way that the basics can be included in a curriculum of some sort. Like sex, it may not seem relevant at the time (maybe that was just me), but, if well taught, could come back to mind when needed and perhaps point a few in the right direction.
Should Financial Education be as important as Sex Education?
We’ve talked before about the ‘Hotel des Parents’, where many are having stay well into their thirties, until incomes finally catch up with house prices and they can step onto the ladder and become first-time buyers.
