Politics: should schools teach personal financial planning?

With a big minority not planning for redundancy or retirement, perhaps we've got it wrong.

Should we have a National Curriculum which incorporates Personal Financial Planning?   If you're aged 18 or so, are you saving?

When you're young, you've your whole life ahead of you, and cares are blown away by the breeze. 

If you're younger and not planning, you're one of many it seems.  The Evening Standard reported retirement specialist LV concluding "only one in three people aged between 18 and 29 (30%) are saving anything towards retirement and only 47% aged 30 to 49 are doing so."   

Are you surprised?  I'm not, paricularly.  It's an expensive business living in London, even in other parts of the country, and people are encouraged to keep up by peer pressure.  Holdays, clothes, kids' education, the quality of house or apartment.  There's alot to live up to in the consumer society.

And yet redundancy can hit almost anyone anytime. Or illness.  Even, premature retirement.  And finally, planned retirement looms far faster than most imagine.

So, why not save for the unexpected?  Perhaps that should be a Coalition mantra.  Their austerity programme is hitting loads of people who thought they were immune.  Cosseted by subsidy as they are.  Suddenly, harsh reality dawns. 

As subsidies are withdrawn, and people start to actually pay for goods and services at near-to-cost prices, the need to start to save for that rainy day becomes ever more pronounced.  Now might well be a very good time to educate kids in the dangers of spending and not saving.  In  Eastern cultures saving's a way of life, but can it become one in England?

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