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

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All of these things suggest lots of ways in the book that people could, you know, just take those, put them on their financial to-do list and get going. Just try and do one thing with your money if you can every week. Don’t feel like you’ve got to sort it all out in one go because that’s just totally overwhelming. Just be realistic and say, “OK, this week I’m gonna look at that. Next week, I might have a look at what credit card I could apply for.” Don’t try and do it all at once. Even things like direct debits, we’ve got the same amounts of money coming out for something every month. It would be wonderful if we could have some flexibility with that. Well, thank you very much for your question. And we had one more question from the man in the gilet.

Well, I think the thing that people find really scary is often the numbers side, but in actual fact understanding investment is about understanding ideas far more than it’s about understanding numbers. And the numbers are, is a kind of language, if you like. There are stories in the numbers. And once you’ve got past the initial fear and you know the basic principles, it’s a lot easier to get your head round. Likewise, the piggy banks I bought for her five-year-old twin brothers are gathering dust on the shelf. When my brother and I were their age, we hoarded coins to buy penny sweets in the local post office. Today, there are very few places (in central London, at least) where children can spend small amounts of their own money. They also knew an awful lot about crypto — as FT columnist-turned-teacher Lucy Kellaway has also found with her students — not to mention gambling and “ buy now pay later”, even though you have to be over 18 (legally) to do any of these. This is an audio transcript of the Money Clinic podcast episode: ‘ What they don’t teach you about money ’ I think it shows me that they know themselves. They know what their business needs and they know which parts of that they can provide and which bits they can’t. That’s really important.

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This is an audio transcript of the Money Clinic podcast episode: ‘ Investment masterclass: Four ways to beat the market ’ I don’t think I really understood how your student debt interest rate could vary over time and how it would be affected by inflation. I’m not sure if I’m right, but I kind of assumed that your student debt interest rate was kind of, was fixed over the rest, over the 20 years. Forget pounds, dollars or even bitcoin. There’s only one currency that my two-year-old niece currently understands — and it’s pain aux raisins. Absolutely. Business is actually quite simple. It’s not easy. And there’s a difference. You know, it’s hard work and it can be, you know, it can be risky, but it’s actually quite simple. The fundaments of business. It’s funny, when I wrote this book, it was a wonderful exercise for me because it made me simplify stuff. You know, take all of this stuff that over life you just grow in, you overcomplicate, add layers and layers and layers and try to talk about it, you know, to six- to nine-year-olds, getting down to the thing that actually matters, it was a brilliant exercise for me. Now, let’s talk about successes in the den. As an investor, what impresses you the most about someone who’s pitching?

Give us some examples, Algy, of companies that would fit within that dividend screen, whether you call them low-volatility, boring, dependable. Give us a few names. So true. And the trouble is, so that’s actually OK if you’re a sole operator and you think, well, actually that’s kind of my wage. But once you take an investor on board, the investor has got to think when this business grows, we’re going to have to pay people to do these jobs. So we’re gonna have to work out whether or not this model works when you’ve actually got to pay people properly. 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 . . .Do you have any practical tips about how people can pay more attention to where our investments are going and the kind of businesses they’re funding and the kind of attitude our banks might take to all of this? Well, I think some interesting companies at the moment are the big oil and gas companies. There’s a lot of pessimism about whether they’ll be able to stay in business in the future because obviously the energy transition is something that has to happen.

I’ve never thought it is a subject that should be introduced later. It’s such a part of our life. You know, the reason I think I’ve been good with money is that we didn’t have any when I was tiny and it was a big conversation in the house and it wasn’t in a worrying way. It was just like, what are we gonna do to build a better life? And I think that was a real gift because I didn’t learn about money, you know, I just absorbed about it. And I thought, it’s not even in the school curriculum. And how can this lifeblood of the way our entire society works, how can that not be on the school curriculum from the day they first step foot over that school threshold? So I thought, well, well, there’s a gap. It needs to be written. Whether or not I’m the person to write it or not, we’ll see.Even if I gave my niece some coins to help her learn the value of money, there’s another problem. Since Covid-19, plenty of businesses have gone cashless, and I buy nearly everything online.

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.Thank you so much for enlightening us, actually. I think . . . I just think keep doing what you’re doing and keep enlightening the younger generation with whatever knowledge that you have on the Financial Times. Thank you. And if you were taught more stuff about money in school, what are the kind of things that you’d like to learn more about? And what would you say is the worst investment that you’ve ever made, like, not just Dragons’ Den, in your in your life? And what did you learn from it? 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. But I stumbled into financial journalism whilst trying to be a successful illustrator. So I don’t I don’t know how that works, but . . .