How to teach young people to be good with money
Big picture stuff
Vivi Friedgut is the Founder of Blackbullion, a company that helps UK students get better at personal finance.
She’s glad money was talked about in her childhood home, e.g. as kids, they were given a certain amount of money to do the food shopping and shown bills by their parents when they went out.
So where should students start? She thinks it’s as simple as doing a budget, and when you have some spare money, save and invest it.
This can be as little as a quid a month to get into good habits.
It's so powerful if you can set yourself up with good habits as a student because time is a massive lever in finance. The amount you can put aside isn’t important when you're young - it’s just getting started.
Changing face of student finance
Vivi doesn’t believe the state will be able to deliver financial education well.
For instance, Martin Lewis was part of a cross party government group which managed to get a law passed mandating financial education in schools - but the average school only does an hour of teaching a year.
This is partly why she thinks personal finance should ultimately be taught by parents raising their kids. But that relies on parents knowing what to do.
Vivi thinks the most valuable thing people get out of uni is their network.
She describes this as social capital, how many people you need to call to get what you want.
She thinks we’re infantilising students, treating them like children - we're not setting themselves up for success by building resilience.
Students don’t really use credit cards any more and only 34% have student loans, which is a big shift.
Instead, they like 'buy now pay later', because the debt is time bound - unlike credit cards.
There are more ways to make money as a student now because of digital businesses like dropshipping and freelancing on sites like Fiverr.
