youthmoney

The BBC asked a panel of money experts to devise a quiz on financial knowledge. What did they come up with?

A dog’s breakfast of drivel, exposing what is wrong with the way experts think about financial knowledge.

According to this quiz, one of the main things people need to know is the details of particular wealth & property taxes – the level at which stamp duty is payable, and the inheritance tax limits. Such things affect a very small proportion of the population. Knowing the exact amounts scarcely affects behaviour or attitude. They impinge on the lives of young people hardly at all.

Then there’s absurdly advanced mental arithmetic. Assume your credit card is charging 18% APR and you have used it to buy a computer for 500 GBP, says the quiz. Exactly how many years and months will it take to pay off, making just the minimum monthly payment of 5 GBP? If you can do that in your head, you have a rare gift. But that skill won’t help, and certainly isn’t essential, to good financial knowledge.

There’s a vocabulary test – what does Isa stand for? – and another request for the fine detail of current tax-free saving limits.

State benefits are covered by a couple of questions, but only as they apply to those of pensionable age.

How do these match key areas of financial capability? They don’t. Financial capability is about making ends meet, keeping track of finances, planning ahead and a certain amount of product knowledge.

These shockingly irrelevant questions are worse than pointless. Their effect is to alienate people. Getting a low score on a lot of pointless questions will make people less, not more, inclined to take an active interest in money management.

Just to show this is not sour grapes – I personally did fine on the test. I got eight out of ten, having guessed wrongly on the average interest rate payable in January and the silly APR calculation. But knowing the IHT limits or the winter fuel payment rates does not mean I have the financial know-how that matters.

This may all seem over-solemn for a fun quiz. But it isn’t. The purpose of a fun quiz should be to demystify and encourage. It’s as if the “panel of experts” have deliberately tried to emphasise the arcane mysteries of their craft, to aggrandise themselves and keep outsiders in the dark. A disgrace.

Update—3.43pm 18 Feb—Just had my answers recalculated. I got 9 out of 10. I’d guessed right on the credit card question. They got their “sums wrong”. Which makes my point.