youthmoney

What’s the point of using a debit card, rather than cash? Fourteen-year-old Daniel White (pictured right) gives a good reason, as quoted in the Daily Mail.
‘Having a card to buy things with means I end up saving money,’ he says. ‘Before, if I wanted to buy something costing £12 and used a £20 note, I [...]

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“Loan fat cats prey on the desperate poor to fund mansion lifestyle,” said yesterday’s News of the World. Under a headline “You vultures!”, it laid charges of cashing in on Britain’s poorest against  high-street store BrightHouse and its rent-to-buy schemes for household goods.
The paper reports that the company is “raking in record profits of £20million [...]

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Here’s some sound advice – from a column on the BBC website called How to money spin.
Make a budget and stick to it. Putting the numbers down on paper will show you just where all the money is going. Set a limit on how much you are going to spend and stick to it

It’s from [...]

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Eighteen-year-old Gabriella gave money to her boyfriend when he was out of work.
The money I gave him went on his booze and cigarettes. I was making £200 a month and after giving him money I’d have nothing left for myself.
If I told him I didn’t have any money, he’d call me a liar and check [...]

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Quote of the week. “I thought it was something to do with the Government’s education maintenance allowance scheme, which funds sixth-formers to encourage us to stay in school.”
That was 16-year-old William Bowen, quoted in the Times. He’d discovered an entirely unexplained £2m in his bank account.
The immediate spending spree has left William with a hefty [...]

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Lively piece on attitudes to money from a Financial Times columnist. Stay with this. Lucy Kellaway may have a lifestyle way beyond that of skint and indebted young people. But the principles she explores still hold good.
The theme of her latest column is irrationality. She looks at the odd realities of our attitudes to money [...]

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A young mother borrowed £1,000 from a doorstep lender to pay for furniture. Two years later she had repaid the company £3,800 at a rate of £159 a month. She still owed £600.
Hers was one of the case studies featured recently at an event hosted by Leeds City Credit Union.
The credit union gave the young [...]

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The unfairness of variable minimum wage rates was neatly identified by an 18 year old from the London borough of Newham. She was interviewed on BBC R4’s Moneybox programme at the weekend. Get the podcast if you want. Item starts around 18.27 mins into it.
A shopworker, the young woman had just got a supervisor job. Yet her £4.45 [...]

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Young people’s money-handling strategies are interestingly explored in a new report on cannabis published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Researchers at from the University of Bedfordshire asked young people from two shire counties about their cannabis use, and the costs of it.
First, participants often gave figures for the amount spent or amount consumed per day rather [...]

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