1.6m families in 'extreme' debt

Muttipops

Had another thought!
In order to get us to fasten our seatbelts, legislation was introduced, just one example of government stepping it to encourage us to do what is good for us even though you would think it was the sensible thing to do even without the prospect of a fine and am I thinking that human nature being what it is, borrowing and irresponsible borrowing is here to stay until something is done, as someone above stated like in Italy, where the balance must be paid every month,although without knowing more, who knows how good their loans system is? One piece of info in isolation doesn't mean it is a perfect system.

Karonher

The idea of paying off a credit card each month is good and something I do now but that was not always the case. I would like to think there is a time when you can have fun now and pay later as long as the repayments are affordable. Its when you cant do that that the problems start.

I would have missed out on a lot when I was younger if it had not been possible to pay over a few months. Some of my friends married in their mid-20s and since then, even though we love the holidays we go on now, our holidays have changed dramatically.

We can look back and laugh about the ones we went to before that time but without being able to pay them off over a few months, we would not have been able to go on them. We met at a time when we all worked for the same poorly paying firm.

As we have got older we have been able to save for them, but as 18-25-year-olds going out and having fun, we were not able to.

Hannah_M

I seem to remember 'civics' class in sixth form, half an hour a week. We learnt a bit about how mortgage repayments work, about the law system, and a couple of other random topics. It was vaguely interesting but could definitely have been more focused on practical financial life skills, and been part of the syllabus in earlier years too.


I don't know how it is in other schools, but I think that there should be a revamped, practical syllabus raising awareness of money and the financial side of life. Maybe the government could even make a GCSE out of it, and make it a standard one like maths and English. (Is there a GCSE like that already? If so, it should be more common)