What are we doing?
At the Money Education Foundation we are committed to providing essential money management skills to our next generation of young adults.
We are doing this through initial training sessions which cover the basics starting with income, typical monthly earnings per profession and typical monthly outgoings dependent on living arrangements. The students can see a typical income and expenditure based on their potential future life choices.
We then discuss income, tax payable, and typical monthly outgoings to review how much disposable income they can expect to have left with each month. We look at how decisions relating to purchases, savings, investing have and impact their future wealth.
Why are we doing this?
The subjects of the training are usually incredulous as to how little disposable income they will be left with each month after essential outgoings and various taxes are deducted from their income. We play around with different scenarios to show students how actions can either increase or decrease their disposable monthly income.
We look at how different scenarios will impact their financial health and wellbeing. We look at online gambling, purchases of expensive designed goods, and investing in crypto.
After a short break we look at how a credit score is calculated, and how their credit score impacts their access to both credit and essential services such as WiFi contracts, mobile phones, and how they will most likely be credit searched even by letting agents on behalf of landlords.
We look at essential credit and their potential borrowing opportunities dependent on different credit scores ranging from low APR loans if they are homeowners with good credit rating to if they are council or private tenants and have impaired credit. We also look at if they are unable to access essential credit what will they do and the risks of illegal lending.
We cover savings, the options for keeping money in a bank versus investing in shares, and crypto. The likely risks and likely returns of all of these options and the effects their decision make on their future financial well being. We look at compounding interest on investments.
We focus on earning income from their chosen careers, and earning passive income from investments and how the passive income can help to increase their financial wealth.
Our session then focuses on the importance of saving and investing to generate future passive income, and the importance of working harder today to provide financial well being in the future.
Making education interactive
We register each person on an interactive game we have developed to replicate a life starting at birth and lasting up to 85 years with various questions and points for accumulating or losing money throughout their life journeys. The game can take up to 85 minutes to play, but can be played in short sessions.
The players can make decisions to change career, create a side hustle, to buy things, or to make investments and to save money. All of their decisions create an increase or decrease in their financial well being and wealth they have with investment or borrowing options.
