Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ep 33: Will Rainey on teaching children about money
297 Plays1 year ago
We sat down to speak to Will Rainey, who has written a new book called “Grandpa’s Fortune Fables”, a book aimed at educating children which is full of metaphors, stories and exercises about money.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to TEBI Podcast with Will Rainey
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the TEBI podcast from The Evidence-Based Investor. I'm Robin Powell, and this podcast is produced by Regis Media, a niche provider of educational and marketing content
00:00:19
Speaker
for financial advice and planning firms. On this episode, we're talking about financial education for children.
Will Rainey's Career Transition
00:00:27
Speaker
Our guest is Will Rainey, a writer and speaker with a passion for helping parents teach their children about money. His website bluetreesavings.com has helped thousands of parents start talking to their kids about this hugely important aspect of life.
00:00:47
Speaker
Will has also just written a book for children, Grandpa's Fortune Fables. In a previous life, he was an award-winning investment consultant
00:00:57
Speaker
advising some of the world's largest financial institutions on their long-term investment strategies. He's also an actuary.
Teaching Financial Literacy to Children
00:01:06
Speaker
Anyone with an interest in financial literacy is going to find this episode fascinating. And I promise you, parents will take away some really valuable lessons. Here's my interview with Will Rainey.
00:01:24
Speaker
Will, welcome to the Tebi podcast. Thank you for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here. Maybe you could start by saying how you became interested in this whole area of teaching children about money. Yeah, well, so it started in about 2019. I was still working as a full-time investment consulting
00:01:50
Speaker
advising some of the world's largest institutions about what to do with their investments, but decided that we were going to take some time off to spend with our two young daughters.
BlueTree Savings and Money Metaphor
00:01:59
Speaker
So my wife and I were in Hong Kong and we decided to leave Hong Kong. We've moved to Vietnam where I am now. And whilst the kids, so the main project was to just spend time with the kids. But whilst we're here and the kids are at school, I wanted to have a kind of a project. And one of the kind of projects I wanted is to teach my kids about money because we have this
00:02:17
Speaker
Fantastic opportunity to take time off for work to be with them and that's because we've been saving and investing and looking after our money for the longest time. We wanted to instill that into our kids. Now I was kind of looking around to say who else is doing this and there's very few kind of resources out there.
00:02:35
Speaker
So I thought, well, this is going to be my kind of niche. Um, there's some really good material out there for, for young kids, but not much for parents, for parents who want to teach their kids. So yeah, that's where I thought, right. I'm going to come in there and teach my kids, spend time with them, use those my guinea pigs, and then try and help as many other families as
Creating Grandpa's Fortune Fables
00:02:54
Speaker
possible.
00:02:54
Speaker
Tell me about BlueTree Savings, how does that fit in? When I started I wanted to have a platform to be able to teach kids, well teach parents how to teach their kids about money and so I started a company called BlueTree Savings and I call it BlueTree Savings because I try and get all parents to
00:03:14
Speaker
get their children to think of money like seeds and they can give those seeds away and that's like spending or they can plant them and plant them that means kind of saving and investing and so I always said to my children if you plant them they'll kind of grow and they'll grow into these kind of trees so kids can kind of visualize this kind of money growing
00:03:33
Speaker
And I want them to feel that their goal is to grow this kind of forest and to distinguish them from different trees. I call them blue trees. So hopefully helping kids form and have this aspiration of having their own blue tree forest and saving for the long term.
00:03:51
Speaker
And yeah, and BlueTree Savings, my platform has blogs and courses to help parents look at any kind of money subject and say, right, how can I learn this for myself, but in such a simple way that I can then teach my kids
Why Start Financial Education Early?
00:04:04
Speaker
about that. So whether that's just regular savings, about investing, about debt, scams, gambling, all these different topics that we're never taught as when we were growing up, to be able to teach it in such a way that they can teach their kids using analogies and stories.
00:04:19
Speaker
But tell me about the book you've written, Grandpa's Fortune Fables. How did you have the idea for this book?
00:04:29
Speaker
So as I mentioned, I've been writing these blogs articles for the last two, two and a half years. And I wanted to find really engaging ways of getting parents and children to enjoy the subject money. So I started writing these little mini stories about a particular money topic. So whether that was, I did one about working smart and I had these two farmers when it was a happy farmer, sad farmer, and they kind of have these different lives.
00:04:53
Speaker
and kind of really got these characters and people can hook onto them and the feedback was really really positive from these different stories and so after this period of time had a collection of them
00:05:04
Speaker
and so i decided i'm going to put these into a book or actually quite a few people said have you got a book you should write a book so i tried to take all these little stories and put them together and that's where grandpa's fortune fables came from and so the book has this young girl who has meets a new friend and she just tells her her new friend about how she's looking after her money based on stories from her grandfather who went off to this faraway island and he
00:05:33
Speaker
has nothing but kind of learns the rules of wealth whilst he's there and so you've got these different characters throughout the book which children kind of relate to it's all done in kind of fun ways so it's not like a textbook and so it's aimed at sort of seven to thirteen year olds to read them by themselves but a lot of parents are reading it with their their children and
00:05:54
Speaker
even younger and that, and the parents are loving it as well. The parents are saying, I've never been taught any of this because one of the chapters and one of the stories is about investing. And as we both know, that's just a subject that no one's really taught about and they have to go and proactively go and teach themselves.
Parental Advice on Money Conversations
00:06:10
Speaker
Exactly. And from what I see, Will, it's actually selling pretty well, isn't it?
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah, no, so the feedback has been really positive and people have been buying a copy or reading a copy then coming back and saying, look, I read it and I've now bought it for my nieces, my nephews and or financial advisors are buying it for their clients because they're part of their families.
00:06:32
Speaker
And people are now starting to buy it for schools as well, which is fantastic. I'd love to have this book in as many school libraries as possible, because it just tries to break away from some of that taboo. And because at the end of each chapter, it has like a discussion point. And so some schools are using that as a forum to get classrooms talking about money, which is fantastic. We both know that.
00:06:55
Speaker
we need to break this taboo status that money has. You're targeting this sort of, you say, seven to 13 age range. Why is that such a critical age range, do you think? I mean, we're used to talking about teenagers and financial education, and I stress they're talking about it rather than actually getting on and providing it. We hear less about
00:07:25
Speaker
financial education for children who are pre teenage years, if you like, why is that so important that age range? Oh, it's incredibly important because that's when our brains are kind of forming like links and trying that children are observing so much. And even if we're not talking to children about money, they're observing it. And one of the key pieces is if children kind of are never taught about money from a young age,
00:07:54
Speaker
all they're going to do is associate money with spending because they're going to see it. Okay. Uh, you go to the shops and money's been transacted less so at the moment because of the cashflow society we're living. But what children are forming is very strong habits of money spending, money spending, especially when children get given pocket money or two fairy money or birthday money. And adults will say to them, what are you going to go and buy with that money? So again, just a strong, strong association.
00:08:22
Speaker
And we know that these kind of links that happen in the brain are hard to change when they're adults. And so what we need to do from a young age is teach children that there are these other uses of money and not just teach them that they need to think about saving or investing or
00:08:41
Speaker
giving to charity, for example, but we need to help them actually do that as well. And so we need to help our kids form different actions with money rather than just spending because what we learn and the habits that we form as children ultimately go into the behaviors and habits that we have as adults and that dictates our financial future. What are the practical steps that parents can be taking to help their children if they have children around that sort of age?
00:09:11
Speaker
Yeah, so the first one is just A, just to talk to children about money. So using that analogy of money being like seeds is very, very powerful. It's very engaging and you get some great conversations out of it.
00:09:22
Speaker
But then the next bit is to say, we need to put this into action. And so the biggest piece of advice in terms of action is every time your child gets given some money from wherever, get them to save just a little bit of it. Even if it's just 10p out of every pound that they get. It doesn't matter how small it is, just get them put it aside.
00:09:44
Speaker
And what that does is it just means they're getting into that habit. And so when they're adults, when they're saving, it's just what they do. That's always what they've always done rather than just getting into cons. Because if they're just spending everything, and it's really powerful because for children, if they have a pound or 90p, it's not going to make a massive difference to what their utility or how happy they are. They still get to do that. But what they do see is that those 10p's add up over time.
00:10:12
Speaker
and especially if and once they see though and see have that patience to see money growing and once you start to see money growing as people who have saved and invested will see it then becomes fun and addictive and you want to save more and more and more and we want to start that kind of
00:10:30
Speaker
process as early as possible so yeah every time children get some money get them saved just a little bit it's so powerful and so simple and something you said earlier really struck a chord with me you're talking about these seeds and you can either you know
00:10:44
Speaker
sow the seeds, if you like, plant them in terms of saving, investing. But you could also, I can't remember the phrase you use, but you could actually give them away, you know, you obviously spend the money on yourself. But a really important point is to teach children that actually, you know, they should be looking at sharing the wealth that they're
00:11:09
Speaker
fortunate enough to enjoy with other people and needy people particularly and charitable causes. It's so powerful in kind of three different ways. One is A, it's just given a massive benefit to the time or money that they're giving to the people in need. But it does two other things. One is it gives children this kind of sense that when we do give, we actually get a huge positive happy feeling when we do.
00:11:38
Speaker
We need to get them to like that feeling. And once they do that, then they'll want to give more. But the last one, which I think is super, super powerful is that we, everyone gets into this mindset of we've got to compare ourselves to the Joneses. And that's the biggest kind of.
00:11:53
Speaker
problem that we have and especially with social media and our children now comparing themselves not just to their their neighbors who are all friends who are in the same social economic group but the whole world so everyone's comparing them but once you start giving to charity and you're sort of saying to yourself well I can't really compare myself to Mr. Jones next door because I have no idea how much he's giving
00:12:17
Speaker
away to charity, he might be given some or none. But because I can't make that comparison, because I want to give some away, I want to help, I can't compare myself to him and that's kind of breaking
00:12:30
Speaker
this kind of contract between you and the Joneses next door. And then when you say, well, of course I can't compare them myself to them. I'm not going to, they might be giving, they might not be. And I think if we can start using pieces like giving to charity as a way to stop our children, uh, uh, comparing themselves to Joneses. And that's why I like this kind of blue tree kind of visualization as well. Cause you're saying, well, I've got this blue tree forest and there might be Joe blogs down the road who's got flashy cars and nice coves and all the nice stuff.
00:13:00
Speaker
but you might not have any forests. And of course, we can't see each other's forests. We shouldn't compare ourselves and trying to use all these little bits, visualizations and tactics to break down the Joneses problem that we have.
Shopping Trips as Educational Opportunities
00:13:14
Speaker
My children are young adults now. I mean, my wife and I have been very, very conscious, I'm sure, to be honest, most parents are, that children very much take their cues, if you like, from their parents.
00:13:28
Speaker
what their parents do, how their parents react to things, you know, has a huge influence on them. So, you know, we all try or most of us try not to, you know, swear in front of our children, we try not to get too stressed about things, because this just rubs off on them, doesn't it? And they learn these behaviors. And presumably, well, there's no presumably about it. And I'm sure that children
00:13:58
Speaker
learn about money from from how their parents talk about it and how their parents react to money yeah and one of the interesting ones you mentioned swearing then but it's almost with money it's almost like with swearing almost the absence of swearing means that children pick up that it's a bad thing because they're hearing oh
00:14:20
Speaker
and the same thing with money if parents don't talk about money they're like they find it stressful and they're like oh we don't want to put any of this stress on our children we're not going to talk about it children are going to pick up on that and think money is a bad thing and we need children to be thinking about money in a positive light because the more that you're positive around saying the more you want to learn about it the more you want to manage it whereas a lot of people say money's bad and shun away from it and therefore don't take the time to sort of
00:14:50
Speaker
Even when parents are struggling financially potentially with their pits, try and use talking to your children about money as a catalyst or a point in time to say, right, I'm going to learn with my children about money. I'm going to sort of look at what I've done and try and put a positive spin, right? How did I get into this? What am I going to do to make sure my children don't go into that situation in the future?
00:15:12
Speaker
and what they're going to do to themselves. We need to all be saving some. So as a family, what should we do? So having a positive spin is so, so important. But knowing that for children, it's never too early to start.
00:15:25
Speaker
looking after their money for parents and adults, it's never too late to start as well. So something the parents typically do is take their children to the shops. The children tag along with the weekly grocery shop or whatever it is. So what can parents be doing? What can they be saying? Maybe what questions can they be asking their children while they're doing that?
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question because as I mentioned earlier, we're moving into this kind of cashless society. So children aren't getting to touch or feel money. So parents have to be more proactive. And someone a bit is just asking kids about how much does something cost? Like you might think that the children are going around the shop and they're looking at the prices just as much as we are, but they're probably not. And so we need to be proactive to say how much do you think that shopping bill was once you're walking out of the supermarket? What do you think the most expensive
00:16:25
Speaker
thing was, or how much do you think a particular item was. Again, this just helps children get an understanding
Pocket Money and Budgeting Lessons
00:16:30
Speaker
about the value of different items, not just in absolute, but try and do it relative to different items. So what was more expensive, this or that, the donuts or the grapes. And so they start to get a flavor. One of the great exercises, which I did a post on it, someone did it a few years ago, is they went into a
00:16:49
Speaker
supermarket store and said to their children right here's five pounds go around try and get as much food as possible and we'll give it to the food bank and so it's a great exercise the kids loved it because they get to run around the supermarket they get to look at all the prices and see how much they can make that five pounds go and again it's not practical for every time you go out but
00:17:11
Speaker
just trying to find little teachable moments, um, is so, so powerful, but also to make sure that your children know that when you're tapping the card or the phone or the watch that they know a transaction is happening. And it's so, so obvious to us as adults, but for our children, it's the same as getting some monopoly money out of the wallet and playing with that or touching because essentially it's like touching a button on a screen or a phone.
00:17:39
Speaker
is like touching a button in their games. And we've seen lots of instances where children are racking up loads of their parents' money on these games because they see just touching a button as touching a button in the real world. So we need to make that connection and be more proactive to let children understand what's going on.
00:17:59
Speaker
Will, I love that food bank idea. Another very important lesson that children need to learn is that money needs to be earned if you like. It doesn't just grow on trees.
00:18:14
Speaker
You know, we have to earn it. How do you get that across? Do you talk, for example, about your own work and what a salary is and linking that salary, if you like, to the effort that you're putting in?
00:18:36
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's something that's so, so important and why I do recommend that parents look for ways in which their children can earn money, whether that's doing some extra chores, like my personal view is children shouldn't get paid to make their bed or do some dishes, but maybe doing something in the garden or washing your car, something that you might otherwise pay someone else to do yourself.
00:19:04
Speaker
gets that. But also children are fantastic at coming up with great ideas for starting their own little businesses as well. And whatever those little ways of earning, it does help, as you said, gives them a concept of what
00:19:20
Speaker
hard work does it take to earn this amount of money and then you put that to what we just talked about how much something costs so then you can kind of say right those donuts that we had how much work does that so that's like you washing the car for three times to buy that book or that toy
00:19:37
Speaker
And so even now, now I've released a book, I can say to my children when we're buying saying, no, I need to now go and sell five more books to pay for that. And it just, but even for adults, I think the more that we can start making that connection between the time or effort that we put into how much when we're spending, because at the moment, sometimes a lot of people do spend quite frivolously.
00:20:00
Speaker
But when we say, actually, do you know that's half a day of solid work just for that one thing, we then start going, OK, maybe I'll rethink about my spending. Well, that leads very neatly on to my next question, which is about pocket money. And I absolutely agree with you doing the washing up, making a bed and so on.
00:20:22
Speaker
helping around the house that is part of being in a family to be honest and and you know I'm not necessarily very repaying paying a salary if you like for that. What are your thoughts on pocket money?
00:20:40
Speaker
So I believe that pocket money is the most underrated financial education tool there is. I think all parents, if they can afford to do so, should look to try and give their children some pocket money from pretty much as young as four years old.
00:20:55
Speaker
because it's all about building habits. And if children only get some money when they lose a tooth for birthdays or Christmas, it's quite sporadic. And then it's really hard to form habits at that point. Whereas if they're getting some every week, they can make mistakes and they can learn from them. They can form habits. So as I said, saving just that 10p out of every pound, then that could be formed. But also it's
00:21:21
Speaker
way of transferring responsibility from you to your children as they grow up. Essentially we start with a child and they've got no responsibilities and by the time we get to 18 we want them to have full responsibilities for their their spending and so what we can use pocket money for is a way of slowly transferring that over that that kind of their childhood.
Teenagers, Peer Pressure, and Financial Decisions
00:21:42
Speaker
So with my daughters so they're nine and seven
00:21:45
Speaker
We give them weekly pocket money, but we've said to them, we're only ever going to buy you toys on your birthday and Christmas. Any other toys that you want, you have to pay out of your pocket money. And that's fine. And they save up, they choose which toys they want to buy, they save up, and then they go to shops and spend it.
00:22:04
Speaker
and as they get older we'll start to transfer more responsibilities to them so we'll say right maybe casual clothes we're not going to buy you any more casual clothes but we're going to give you a little bit extra pocket money
00:22:16
Speaker
And so now you have to make decisions about that. So they might go and buy one nice t-shirt or five casual ones they play around with. But they slowly, slowly grow. And then we might get to when they're sort of young teenagers be saying, well, we're not going to start paying for this. You need to find some way of earning that money. And so again, what it's doing is just slowly, slowly giving them a bit more responsibility of their money. So when they get to 18, we're like,
00:22:44
Speaker
we're not giving you any money but you've now they've budgeted they've learned they've made loads of mistakes with their pocket money as children will as when you they'll you have especially have siblings you'll have one that goes off and spends all the money straight away and the other one will be a bit more pragmatic and spread it out
00:23:01
Speaker
But they'll both learn their own ways of managing that money. So yeah, pocket money is just a great, great tool. And of course, there's so much peer pressure, isn't there, that children face. And that peer pressure only grows as they enter their teenage years. Certainly the experience that we had with our own children is, you know, the pressures to spend money on
00:23:26
Speaker
on things is huge. What can parents do to help teenagers through that? There's a couple of things on that. One is having these, showing them that these other characters in the world, so what they're seeing on social media and what they're going to see in terms of the peer pressure is what I call the rich, where they're looking, they've got nice things, but we don't know what's behind that.
00:23:54
Speaker
And so we don't know if they've got any trees or forests for savings behind that. And what we don't see on social media around that is people who have been saving. So like the millionaire next door kind of mindset. So we need as parents to be able to teach our children that just because someone has a lot of nice things and there's pressure to go and spend doesn't mean that they're well off. It doesn't mean they might have no savings. They might be using debt. It depends on how old the child is.
00:24:25
Speaker
And so we need to make sure that they're aware of this. But then the other piece is just make sure that children know about what we're proactive about talking to our children about peer pressure and why it's there, how they don't get sucked into it and make sure that we kind of share each other's family values. So we can say, well, that's fine. Those children might have all that, but our family values giving money to charity, or we value going on nice holidays rather than buying nice clothes.
00:24:55
Speaker
and sort of just trying to get the children to say, right, what's your values? What do you rate? And really does bring you happiness with that and trying to isolate that from what their friends are doing. And the more that they can do that and get comfortable with that, which is hard because we're all insecure beings, but the more we can sort of talk to our children and say, well, in the future, what's your memories?
Young Adults and Financial Responsibility
00:25:16
Speaker
What's your best memories? Is it when you had that nice t-shirt or was it that family holiday that you had? And what about
00:25:22
Speaker
Adolescence and moving into adulthood, maybe going to college, starting work for the first time, earning a salary, leaving home. That's a real challenge for a young person. It should be just purely in so many ways, of course, but financially particularly, but also a really important learning opportunity.
00:25:51
Speaker
What would your advice to parents be? Debt is probably the biggest topic I would say. I remember when I was 18 and left home to go to university I had no real idea about debt and I went to the Freshers Fair and there's one of the credit card companies in there saying here's some essentially
00:26:11
Speaker
In my mind, it sounded like free money. Plus I get this free inflatable chair and I was like, Oh, they're the best. And it's just, I only have to pay this small amount back each month. And I was like, this is fantastic. This is going to be how luckily I did a bit more research and I didn't use the credit card extensively, but I could, I knew others and I've heard so many stories. So we need to teach children or young adults at that time, make sure that they're going into that kind of part of their
00:26:41
Speaker
fully knowledgeable about the dangers of debt, but also just that if they use debt, they are essentially starting behind the line. We want our children to be building this kind of forests mentally, but using debt means that A, you're not planting any seeds, but you're so far away from actually having any seeds to plant because you're going to have to give loads of your seeds away in the future to pay back this debt.
Risks of Speculation vs. Index Funds
00:27:05
Speaker
And so I think that's the biggest one because
00:27:08
Speaker
we know that in the UK we have a debt problem with two thirds of adults in debt not including their mortgages. And a lot of that is because most people aren't fully aware of those dates. That's one. And the other is about just getting their children to be patient. And I think it's just, even from the youngest age,
00:27:28
Speaker
from young adults we need to let them know that the world is going to pay them off it's going to reward them if they are patient and if they aren't patient then at that time they're going to be targeted with scams as we know there's a huge increase in the number of scams targeting young people gambling and again debt is another one which all seems that we can get something for nothing in the short term and we'll think about the
00:27:55
Speaker
long term later whereas the more we can teach our children that patience is what they need young adults they need to be patient it might be a bit rubbish they might feel like I don't want to eat beans on toast again and my pot noodle again but if they do and save diligently then they're going to be handsomely rewarded in the long term.
00:28:16
Speaker
Something that horrified me, particularly when my son was, I suppose, just entering sixth form that sort of age, he'd come back and he'd tell me about friends of his who would spend £50, £100, £150 a week gambling on football results. You know, sports betting, if you like.
00:28:41
Speaker
And that absolutely horrified me because, you know, frankly, even if I had that kind of money to sort of spend frivolously every week, you know, I wouldn't dream of gambling it. And that has moved on, hasn't it, I think, in the last couple of years.
00:29:06
Speaker
towards financial speculation. We're seeing the growth of these cryptocurrencies, for example, and these so-called zero-commission trading sites. And of course, a lot of young people have got into this kind of financial speculation, if you like.
00:29:26
Speaker
since the crash of March 2020 brought on by the pandemic. And we've seen this really remarkable, very surprising in many ways, recovery in asset prices. And young people think they're kind of stock picking geniuses, financial gurus, if you like.
00:29:56
Speaker
And this is very worrying, isn't it? It is. It's really worrying. And it comes down to this last point about patience. We need to teach our children that money can't be made quickly without luck. And we don't want to base our future wealth and future financial wellbeing on being lucky. I know there's always going to be little elements of it, but you don't want it to be the main piece. So we need
00:30:20
Speaker
that and so I teach my children about investing in the stock market and using passive funds and just because I want them to see that from a young young age they can see the stock market going up and down and they'll see the bumps so when they become adults they kind of see all right that's the way money does grow and but also I get a bit worried when I see uh other people talking about children and investing and they have these kind of
00:30:47
Speaker
games where it's like oh it's have an investing game right you pick five stocks and you see how you get on i think that's just like why not teach them to pick five horses and see which which one comes out
00:30:59
Speaker
Cause they're going to be, if they do well, they're going to be overconfident. And if they do bad poorly, they're going to probably be put off and neither of those are a good outcome. So we need to teach children how wealth is built sustainably over the longterm and the younger we can teach them that and show that time does, does pay. Then by time they become adults, they won't get so much excited about our short term. I can make, I can become get 300% in the next three months as I saw in one of my inboxes the other day. Wow.
00:31:28
Speaker
And the timescale on these stock picking games is so ridiculous, isn't it? Sometimes they last just a term. Every year, admittedly not for children, but the telegraph has a be-your-own-fund-manager competition. We all know, Will, or anyone who knows anything about the stock markets and equity performance and so on,
00:31:56
Speaker
knows that anything less than 10 years really, at the bare minimum, is really just kind of random noise. So you encourage them, and I'm really pleased to hear that, to invest in or at least think about index funds. Did you actually get them to put their money in index funds as well?
00:32:23
Speaker
Yeah. So we've been doing it on their behalf, um, since they've been very, very young. And so we've been telling them what we've been doing and they, every time they get some pocket money or any money, they can choose how much they want to put into, uh, top up how much they invest and they're both really interested in it. Um, they don't sit there looking at individual stocks, et cetera, but they know what investing is. So we, whilst we don't pick individual companies, I remember when my eldest was seven, we're in McDonald's in,
00:32:52
Speaker
Hong Kong and I was like, you know that you own a piece of this McDonald's and those people buying the burgers, some of that money is yours. And they just changed their whole mindset. From a young, young age, they've got this ownership mindset rather than just a pure consumer mindset. And therefore when they do save, they get that buzz of knowing
Parents' Role in Financial Literacy
00:33:11
Speaker
that
00:33:11
Speaker
more of those burgers are going towards their blue trees. Yeah, and also I suppose encouraging children now and young people to invest sensibly in sort of
00:33:28
Speaker
and broadly diversified funds, not just giving them a sense of ownership, but also a responsibility. So if, for example, a company that they own is doing something that they don't approve of, for environmental or social or whatever reasons, then actually to take an interest in that and actually to try to do something about it. Yeah, nice.
00:33:56
Speaker
My kids are learning all about the environmental and social side of things. I remember my daughter joined me to a corporate workshop recently, and I was saying, we invest in thousands of different companies for my kids. And my daughter sort of chipped in, not anyone's that sell guns or do drugs or harm the environment. And I was like, yeah.
00:34:17
Speaker
She's really passionate about that and feels really good about what she's doing. Excellent. So, financial education provision for young people. Again, it's a big subject, but briefly Will, what would you like to see? Would you like to see more financial education in schools and if so, what kind of lessons? My personal view is the focus has to be on parents teaching their kids about money.
00:34:44
Speaker
And so we need more anyone who has access to companies, financial advisors, asset managers, et cetera, providing education materials to help parents teach their children. And that's because whilst I think it's fantastic that there are charities going into schools and teaching children directly about money.
00:35:06
Speaker
those children then learn something and then go home and see the parents doing something differently that can be a bit confusing. But also money is all about actions and it's very hard for schools to help children form actions. They can provide the knowledge but not like the behaviors and habits and that's why parents can do that with pocket money and
00:35:28
Speaker
having those little teachable moments on an ongoing basis and in a real world context. So I think more should be done at schools for that knowledge, but we need more and more about parents getting that education, but also helping kids form those actions. And so I'd encourage any kind of financial institution to really think about how they can help the parents that they interact with teach their children, whether that's providing
Tips for Instilling Saving Habits
00:35:57
Speaker
resources, videos, books to help children and parents learn together. Well, this has been a really interesting discussion. To be honest, well, I wish I'd had this conversation when I was a new parent, to be honest. Maybe you could just finish with, and sorry to put you on the spot a little bit, but possibly a single actionable tip, if you like, that
00:36:26
Speaker
You know, any parents listening to this podcast can take away and use that tip to help teach their children about money. What would it be? Yeah, I'll go back to the one I mentioned earlier and that's every time your children get some money, get them to save just a little bit. It doesn't matter how small it is, just get them taking that action and do it every single time and they'll become a saver. And as you've written in your book,
00:36:53
Speaker
Robin, it's about how much you save and once they start saving they can then grow that money and they have that security if there's emergency and they're going to less likely use debt.
00:37:04
Speaker
And so it's just a foundation. You need to save just a little bit every time. Absolutely right. And if I could add a second tip listener, it would be to buy Will's book. Just a reminder, Will, of the title of your book and how can people buy it? So the book's called Grandpa's Fortune Fables. It's for reading age 7 to 13, but great for parents to read with younger children.
Conclusion and Podcast Engagement
00:37:30
Speaker
And I encourage all parents to read it with your children.
00:37:33
Speaker
It's available on Amazon and it's in either Kindle version or paperback or an even hardback. If you are looking to buy multiple copies, so five plus, then please come to my website, which is bluetreesavings.com and on there you can get a discount for bulk orders. And if you're going to buy some for schools, there's an even bigger discount, which you can find on the website.
00:38:02
Speaker
You've been listening to me, Robin Powell, interviewing Will Rainey on the Tebby podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to it. Better still, why not write a review? Thank you to Regis Media for producing and funding this podcast. Thank you to Will Rainey. And most of all, as always, thank you to you for listening.