What They Don't Teach You About Money: The Instant Top Ten Bestseller

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While the cost of apps, smart devices and broadband is not something every family can afford, these are future financial lessons that every child needs to be taught. Now, Algy, this book is incredibly impressive. There’s lots of investment strategy talk, lots of fine numbers, lots of really hard work that you’ve put into this. But it’s not your first book, is it? (laughter) This is an audio transcript of the Money Clinic podcast episode: ‘ What they don’t teach you about money ’ Children need to be able to operate confidently in today’s increasingly cashless society,” she says. “If you’re not enabling these skills at an early age, the risk is they get launched into the adult world of easy credit and easy access to funds, and end up in a bad place.”

Well, that’s interesting because I think maths gets a bit of a, disengages. The word maths disengages people because it doesn’t connect what they’re doing with what they need in real life. And of course they need numbers in real life, numeracy. But a lot of the stuff I learned I thought I am never, ever, ever going to use and I really wouldn’t need to do it till I am 18. You can have a feeling for what you’re gonna need. So I think what I would like to see is numeracy actually embedded into the subjects that it should be, that need it and mass-embedded into the subjects that need it instead of being the slightly separate topic, just a different, you know, holistic approach to it, which gives you a much better idea of why I’m bothering to learn this. Now, Susannah, you interviewed Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist. Now, how did that go? And give us your take on the outlook for next year.

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Welcome to Money Clinic, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times about personal finance and investing. I’m Claer Barrett, the FT’s consumer editor.

They really think, oh I don’t really want to do all of that. So sometimes that’s the reason it doesn’t work. But I don’t really judge them as long as I’m happy with the investments that I’ve got, not just financially, you know. Are they, have they got the right impact? Are they doing things in the right way? Are they ethical and are they making money?No, I don’t, because I think children, they live in households where those words come up. And I always think children worry much more about things they hear and don’t understand than the things that are actually explained to them. So this is, it’s just normalising some of those words that might feel worrying to them. Nobody says tax in a jolly, happy way, do they? TV and radio money-agony-aunt Claer Barrett is the voice of reason in the cost of living crisis, teaching us what we need to know about money, in an accessible way that anyone can understand. Actually, it’s a really good question because I got a lot of people saying, do I give up my job now? You know, when do I give up my job? I’ve got this thing going on. And it’s a very difficult one for me to answer in that because you had to know so much about the life somebody is living. So a single person in a job that they’re not really enjoying an awful lot. You know, they found this little thing that might be going quite well. It gets to the point where you think, well, I think I might have a business here. You know, I think it might be able to support me, can probably take an awful lot more risk than somebody who’s got a young family. Maybe they’ve got a new baby, they’ve got a really well-paid job. Even if their business is doing twice as well as the single person they might think, actually, now isn’t my moment. So I think, you know, timing is all important. It could be something like that and also at the moment it could be to do with inflation in cost, something like that, something to do with supply chains. It could just be to do with fears about the economic cycle. So we have a lot of housebuilders and car dealers, which are extremely cheap by their historic standards because we’re very fretful about the recession. But also we’ve seen quite a few companies taken over because there are other people out there who are looking at them now and saying, well, actually . . .

I mean, this may come as a surprise, but with that large amount of money, I wouldn’t spend it. I would like to keep it and just put it in my bank, and let it just sit there. Because it’s such a large amount of money, I wouldn’t even know the first thing to spend it on. So I think I would just let it sit there in my bank account and then waste it over the months. I don’t know. So when I was 19 . . . no, earlier, 16, I went to business, left school at 16, didn’t do A-levels, went to business college, and my thesis at college was on climate change. So it was worth it in the end. So keeping on that sort of credit theme, we’ve already got some questions from viewers about credit cards.Well, thank you very much, Deborah Meaden. We have very much enjoyed our podcasting moment with you. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you. It’s quite hard. They can teach us. I mean, they’ve led the way in things like Depop Vintage. Selling stuff online. See, I can’t do that because I don’t find, I don’t judge things in best and worst. Because I make bad decisions, I make bad investments. But you don’t have to get everything right. If you strive to get everything right, you won’t invest in anything because nothing is known. You know, you’re making your best guess at whether or not this is going to work. You know, do I, using all of my knowledge or my judgment, has this got a fair chance? So when I get it wrong, to me, that’s just part of the investing process. You know, I’ve just got to get more right than I get wrong. So getting it wrong, I don’t like getting it wrong. Nobody likes losing their money. Sometimes I’ve got it wrong because I simply can’t work with the people. And I don’t mean I can’t work with them in a sort of, you know, falling out sort of way. Just that we have different desires. When you’ve got an investor on board, you know that you’ve got a slightly different path. You’re looking for a return on their investment and sometimes you find that the person that you’re helping really didn’t want what they thought they wanted. They actually want an easy life. They don’t want me going, look, I can get you into, you know, Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s. Yes. Overspenders Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, and these are really helpful organisations, but I guess the partner has to admit that they’re powerless. You know, that’s the step one.

No, you have to be a stable business. And oil companies aren’t stable. So you, actually you’re getting a high yield because the risk of that dividend disappearing is quite high. You’re not looking into this kind of dull and conservative story that’s super attractive. They’re the numbers that tell you whether or not you’re making any money. So your turnover, are you selling enough? OK. That’s the business. I’m selling enough to make it a business. Your gross profit says, actually at the, you know, I’m selling it for more than it costs me. And then your net profit says, OK, well, I’ve got all those overheads, you know, am I actually paying for the cost of running the business? So although I made money on the goods, am I making enough money to pay for all of the costs of the business? Certainly that’s what the mortgage market is pricing in if you’re somebody who’s looking to refinance your home loan. Sarah, is there a risk that the Bank of England has overdone it?No, when I was a personal finance journalist, my credit score was absolutely appalling. So I totally get that. (laughter)