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 [...]

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Young people don’t like owing money. They worry about it. They avoid it if they can. They are, in the financial industry’s jargon, debt-averse.
That’s not surprising to anyone who talks regularly to young people about money. But it challenges widespread assumptions that young people are a reckless, spend-now generation that accepts debt as way of [...]

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A young person tells you that they are in a whole heap of debt. They don’t know what to do. What would be your response?

The quick answer is to stay calm and get help. People get in debt, and they can get out of it. Slowly and sometimes with difficulty. Debt is a very hard [...]

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Most under-25s are not sinking under an unbearable burden of debt. Sorry if saying that goes against the trend. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to overstate a problem.
“Half of 18-34 year olds say they have debts of up to £10,000″. That’s a typical form of words used by those trying to communicate [...]

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There’s an interesting, thoughtful, well-sourced look at young people’s attitude to money, and their anxieties about future debt, on the Guardian.co.uk website.
Sorry. Just joking. Actually it’s a badly rearranged press release. But that’s churnalism for you.
The press release, and the article, quote a senior corporate PR person from Community Service Volunteers saying young people are [...]

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Last week I write about BrightHouse. Today I get round to looking at last weekend’s papers. And find the Observer’s Cash editor, Jill Insley, writing about the very same “household retailers”, as she calls them.
Insley tells how Sophie Latham, a 21-year-old single parent, is struggling to make ends meet. She has bought a bed, washing [...]

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Imagine a young graduate who wants to get out of debt. They are also thinking of a gap year, before getting a career job.
Why not commit to volunteering for a charity, after first making an agreement with a commercial sponsor? A good deal would be one where a local company, keen to help both a [...]

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First-year students are totting up record debt levels of nearly £6,000 a year, says the Indy.
This morning’s picture front page trails the story of four young people with debts of between £13,000 and £16,000, accumulated during their student careers. Richard Garner, education editor, has the low down.
But what’s this across at the Guardian? Miles Brignall [...]

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The Times previews the money education anouncement expected this week. With Ed Balls, newly appointed secretary of state for Children, Schools and Families, being such a finance & economics prodigy, the long-overdue move should be well handled. Well, fingers crossed.
Opposition leaders don’t seem to have quite got the root of the problem. Michael Gove thinks the best [...]

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