Tuesday 1 May 2012

Grow In Doing Financial Management

By Rae Setser


Financial management is difficult to teach in schools. Even though it may be prescribed in some curricula the problem in teaching it can be summed up in the word, 'readiness'. School children have seldom experienced the real responsibility of earning sufficient money to support themselves and a family.

In many cases they may have been encouraged to earn their own small amounts of money and husband it carefully. The facts are that schoolchildren should be fully occupied in attending school and they are legally prevented from working in the way that they will when they are adults. As a consequence classroom lessons on financial management may seem irrelevant to pupils who cannot imagine the reality of circumstances that will confront them in the future. It is an educational fact that pupils cannot learn what they are not ready to learn.

There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the sort of education that evolved during the twentieth century is inadequate to meet the needs of Internet age children. They seem to learn more from TV and cell phones than they do from the hours that they spend enclosed in crowded classroom with a harassed teacher. Some observers see education in disarray, caught between an old world and a new one, and not knowing which way to turn.

An excellent example of one way in which conventional classroom education is being overtaken by online education is in websites that are designed to help individuals manage their financial affairs. A platform is provided which enables individuals to categorize and track expenses easily. With real money and real decisions being made this kind of practical education is most meaningful. In fact it follows the very old educational principle which is to 'learn by doing'.

People are surrounded by things that they would like and that they can have by buying on credit. The proliferation of contracts that seem sensible, such as insurance policies and loans taken out for houses, cars and the like can easily beguile people into incurring obligations that become too heavy to meet. Debt can become an impossible burden that has to be carried through thickets of obligations that are not always easy to understand

Despite the complexities and traps that might await the unwary there are many benefits in modern society. Inventions such as computers and the software packages that go with them have raised the quality of life to levels that have probably never been experienced before.

Keeping a close check on earning and spending is only one aspect of financial management. High earning people are confronted with many people trying to sell goods and services. Binding contracts that have been skilfully drawn up in favor of one side are proffered to salary earners and the many pages of fine print are seldom read until some crisis occurs. Being a members of a supportive online community can be immensely helpful in helping a person to be money smart.




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