youthmoney

Jill is in debt, and struggling to get out of it. She is a single parent with a bank overdraft and expensive consumer debt on a credit card. Last year she managed to clear the debt on a second credit card. She has plans for 2010 – to get her bank account in the black and pay any credit card debt in full at the end of every month.

That’s  only worth mentioning because Jill Insley is a respected and established financial journalist. She wrote about her money problems in the Guardian on Saturday. She has mentioned them before, in the Observer where she used to edit the Cash section.

She is not alone in admitting the enormous gulf between the advice she dishes out to readers and her own ability to handle money. That edition of Saturday’s Guardian was full of finance writers explaining all the things they tell others to do but haven’t got round to themselves. They include sorting out their pension, making a will, drawing up a budget, switching to a better current account….and so on.

Even allowing for a bit of exaggeration to make a lively feature, it’s clear that Guardian finance writers don’t score highly for their financial capability. Making ends meet, keeping track of finances, planning ahead, choosing products…all FAIL. This does not inspire confidence.

There’s another unfortunate effect of their relentless dishing out of advice and information. It risks demoralising  young people, overwhelming them with the volume of things to think about. It adds to a sense of mystique around handling money. It makes simple things complex, and manageable things seem impossible.

Perhaps Jill Insley and her colleagues would consider a disclaimer on the pages they write:

None of us actually do this stuff. We just write it to worry you. That’s because it suits our advertisers if we create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. That way, some of you will buy products you don’t need and to chop & change the ones you do.

In reality, you can be an above-average manager of money without paying attention to any of this guff.  Just use common sense and the basic products that have been available for years. Take what we write with a pinch of salt, except this disclaimer.

Not likely to happen. But finding other ways to get that message across to young people could be reassuring and empowering for them.