Educating the public

mggftz30

cloud_dog said:

Surely the single biggest way would be to cease to be 🤗

Yes the planet would thrive if humans were extinct 😀

Albermarle

TVAS said:

Well this is what I think. As a nation we are shallow and lazy and stupid. We do not want to learn how things work. How many times have a listened to MoneyBox  when somebody has been ripped off with a pension transfer and manages to find Moneybox after the transfer not before. Well done michaels for what you have done so far. I once overhead a woman saying pensions are really boring so I said there is nothing boring about a woman having her own pension and therefore having her own money. We cannot leave financial education to teachers because they are also ignorant. When we bailed out the !!!!!! banks we should have insisted they do a programme on money and started with the poor areas first. 

Do you really think that people are much more savvy about money in other countries ?
Despite some people thinking that UK is an exceptionally brilliant country or on the other side 'shallow, lazy and stupid ' My own experience is that most developed countries are in fact  remarkably similar and have a lot of similar issues.

Thrugelmir

Albermarle said:

TVAS said:

Well this is what I think. As a nation we are shallow and lazy and stupid. We do not want to learn how things work. How many times have a listened to MoneyBox  when somebody has been ripped off with a pension transfer and manages to find Moneybox after the transfer not before. Well done michaels for what you have done so far. I once overhead a woman saying pensions are really boring so I said there is nothing boring about a woman having her own pension and therefore having her own money. We cannot leave financial education to teachers because they are also ignorant. When we bailed out the !!!!!! banks we should have insisted they do a programme on money and started with the poor areas first. 

Do you really think that people are much more savvy about money in other countries ?

There is something in that generations used to pass on / teach basic money management. The Germans as an example generally remain solid savers. Americanisation has a lot to answer for. In terms of credit cards and the buy it now, pay later culture that prevades these days. Covid will teach a generation a lesson there'll never forget. 

sammyjammy

I'm a civil servant and up to April 2015 when we were in Classic I had friends that I just couldn't get them to understand their pension, I mean that's probably one of the easiest things to understand ever, don't get me started on being contracted out.  God forbid anyone mentions they have a gold plated pension, people just don't get it mostly because they can't be bothered to take the time to understand it and read up on it.  Ignorance is bliss (not)

cfw1994

michaels said:

cfw1994 said:

I’ve said many times on countless threads what an awful job I think we (as a Country) do on educating people about finance in general, never mind the trickier long term thing that is Pensions.

I’m not at all surprised by that article.  

I work in a pretty well paid industry (IT), & am surrounded by people who are relatively clueless.  A small number will probably find they get to their late 50s and find they have unwittingly breached the LTA.  A much larger chunk will be continuing to work, despite having had the tools (brains, income!) to have given themselves choices well before they turn 60 to ‘step down’ if they wanted.  I’ve tried to help people understand the scheme and how things work....even gave a presentation to a bunch of them that were interested, but it is a drop in the ocean of education...

I know a few older pals who have retired and handed their funds over to “Wealth Management” firms because they are too fearful of losing it all.  That is totally their choice, but when I discover they did so ‘because their neighbour knew someone who worked there’, I get the sense that ‘due diligence’ may not have been done

I also know that the Aviva Group Pension scheme they chose to leave is a pretty low cost, decent scheme, with a reasonable choice of 80+ funds: I’ve spoken in some detail with some finance folk (who manage a couple of £Bn in fund management!) who confirmed they would be happy leaving it there.....yes, not advice, because they are not advisors, so ‘just an opinion’, but a pretty knowledgable one.  How many FAs or even IFAs would suggest leaving it there, I wonder?

We’ve done our best to educate our now-early-20s offspring from a young age: Santander do a great account from about the age of 12 that grows in capabilities as the children do, I imagine other banks may offer something similar.   They understand the concept of the power of compounding, & equally, the value of money.  Another thing we really encouraged was cooking, and both are very good in the kitchen. They also chose to be vegetarians, which invariably helps save money!

Yes, I am certain *all* the regulars on here are doing far, far better than the broader population.  

The newbies who post their questions at least are taking steps in the right direction to grasp the mettle and plan.  Failure to plan is planning to fail, as Benjamin Franklin first said.  Probably
(sorry, bit of a ramble!)

Agree with all you say except....I try to increase the number of non-meat meals our family eats and one of the issues is cost, chicken and sausages are cheaper for grammes of protein than the vegetarian alternatives.

We will have to agree to disagree then
I suspect key to it is shopping at local greengrocers, getting good with spices (our 'kids' are much better at this stuff than we are, frankly!).
Plenty of evidence to suggest it *is* cheaper, FWIW, & I couldn't find much to suggest the opposite:
http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/10/12/vegetarian-diet-savings
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/going-vegetarian-can-help-your-waistline-and-your-wallet
https://www.myfinancialbroker.co.uk/blog/tips-tricks/save-on-your-shop/save-going-vegetarian

ratechaser

cloud_dog said:

Surely the single biggest way would be to cease to be 🤗

Breeding is about the most environmentally unfriendly thing we can do in our lifetimes...

perhaps that series Utopia had it right 

TVAS

There are too many of us cluttering up the place, consuming in the West, not consuming in the poorer countries but too many of them because there are insufficient employment opportunities.  Take the UK we don't have the land in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Norway. Yet some of us are still having 4 kids, then complain when we do not have any money. Our population is 67 million and we cannot run a country. We cannot run schools well as a whole, class sizes are too large, hospital provision is lower than Spain France Italy and Germany. We need to stop breeding, eat meat once a day or 3 times a week I am not going bloody vegan and I am not wearing plastic shoes or a bloody plastic handbag. There were two women on Radio 4 a few years ago banging on about recycling. They had 8 kids between them. I just laughed. We are the bloody problem! 

jamesd

mggftz30 said:

I was responding to a post about cost but...if your an environmentalist you should look at a study by University of Oxford which shows the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on earth is to eat a plant based (vegan) diet  

Then that study so limited its scope as to make it wrong. Even having one child creates so much future harm that it's impossible for anything the parents do in their own individual practices to compensate. With individual only scope veganism might be second.

For those who like to ignore the big picture veganism can look good. It isn't. It increases the number of humans that the planet can feed and the other per human penalties. But in the niche of developed countries with stable populations it can reduce consumption without the negatives.

If you really want to do good, fund contraception, abortion and women's education. All known to reduce population growth. Widespread legal abortion in the US had the extra benefit of roughly halving the crime rate with a 20 year lag, the time it takes a child with bad background to reach the start of their peak offending years. Which makes Roe v Wade arguably the best anti-crime decision of the US Supreme Court.

shinytop

The cfw1994 said:

michaels said:

cfw1994 said:

I’ve said many times on countless threads what an awful job I think we (as a Country) do on educating people about finance in general, never mind the trickier long term thing that is Pensions.

I’m not at all surprised by that article.  

I work in a pretty well paid industry (IT), & am surrounded by people who are relatively clueless.  A small number will probably find they get to their late 50s and find they have unwittingly breached the LTA.  A much larger chunk will be continuing to work, despite having had the tools (brains, income!) to have given themselves choices well before they turn 60 to ‘step down’ if they wanted.  I’ve tried to help people understand the scheme and how things work....even gave a presentation to a bunch of them that were interested, but it is a drop in the ocean of education...

I know a few older pals who have retired and handed their funds over to “Wealth Management” firms because they are too fearful of losing it all.  That is totally their choice, but when I discover they did so ‘because their neighbour knew someone who worked there’, I get the sense that ‘due diligence’ may not have been done

I also know that the Aviva Group Pension scheme they chose to leave is a pretty low cost, decent scheme, with a reasonable choice of 80+ funds: I’ve spoken in some detail with some finance folk (who manage a couple of £Bn in fund management!) who confirmed they would be happy leaving it there.....yes, not advice, because they are not advisors, so ‘just an opinion’, but a pretty knowledgable one.  How many FAs or even IFAs would suggest leaving it there, I wonder?

We’ve done our best to educate our now-early-20s offspring from a young age: Santander do a great account from about the age of 12 that grows in capabilities as the children do, I imagine other banks may offer something similar.   They understand the concept of the power of compounding, & equally, the value of money.  Another thing we really encouraged was cooking, and both are very good in the kitchen. They also chose to be vegetarians, which invariably helps save money!

Yes, I am certain *all* the regulars on here are doing far, far better than the broader population.  

The newbies who post their questions at least are taking steps in the right direction to grasp the mettle and plan.  Failure to plan is planning to fail, as Benjamin Franklin first said.  Probably
(sorry, bit of a ramble!)

Agree with all you say except....I try to increase the number of non-meat meals our family eats and one of the issues is cost, chicken and sausages are cheaper for grammes of protein than the vegetarian alternatives.

We will have to agree to disagree then
I suspect key to it is shopping at local greengrocers, getting good with spices (our 'kids' are much better at this stuff than we are, frankly!).
Plenty of evidence to suggest it *is* cheaper, FWIW, & I couldn't find much to suggest the opposite:
http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/10/12/vegetarian-diet-savings
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/going-vegetarian-can-help-your-waistline-and-your-wallet
https://www.myfinancialbroker.co.uk/blog/tips-tricks/save-on-your-shop/save-going-vegetarian

All this foodstuffs talk has its own thread on this very forum.
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6202200/green-and-ethical-food#latest
But while I'm here, have you looked at the ingredient lists on some of the vegan substitute foods like ice cream?   

hugheskevi

A vegan is only concerned with animal welfare, they may also commonly have environmental and/or health considerations, but veganism has always been about the animals. Many use vegan and plant-based as interchangeable, when they are very different things, leading to nonsense statements such as "I'm a part-time vegan" or "I went vegan for January"

shinytop said:

But while I'm here, have you looked at the ingredient lists on some of the vegan substitute foods like ice cream?   

Pretty much any processed or ultra processed food is best avoided, whether containing animal or plant-based products. Wholefood, plant-based ingredients should be the staple of any plant-based diet if doing it for health.

tvas said:

I am not going bloody vegan

That is the second unprompted slight at vegans on this thread, after westv commented a few days ag:

westv said:

Better vegetarian than this god awful vegan nonsense! 

I don't get the hostility and why people feel the need to be so provocative and prejudiced on a pension forum of all things?