For reasons that will become more apparent over the next week or so I have been giving some thought to what might be on a curriculum for young people (probably aged 16 to 18, but maybe older) on the real world financial issues that they might need to face.
Lucky youngsters.
How can you have any pudding if you don’t pay yer tax?
When I worralad, we had “Design for Living” at 14 to 16, which amongst other things taught real world financial issues that you will need to face.
Just think, if my school had wasted our time telling us about investment we’d all have learnt about endowment insurance policies.
Happily it said nowt, except to ensure we understood compound interest. My father added to it by explaining that interest is the rent you pay on borrowed money. That’s much of what you need, isn’t it, at school age?
Is he doing drag queen story time now?
dearime: As Calvin Coolidge said when asked to write off the post-WWI debt, “They hired the money, didn’t they?” “Loan” is the wrong word; it’s a rental.
By the size of his lecture audience, won’t be many of them. Two kids & their dog being taught MMT won’t do much harm.
I’d feel sorry for the dog, though
@ bloke in spain
It’s not so bad. Unlike the two kids, the dog won’t be troubled by the glaring inconsistencies in the lecture material.
@ dearieme
When we were young endowment insurance policies were a good way (both lower total cost and tax-efficient) to pay off mortgages. The Wilson-Healey hyperinflation messed that (and almost everything else) up before Gordon Brown abolished MIRAS.
There were a relatively few policies that failed to pay out enough to clear the mortgage but a good teacher would have warned you about that risk.
The bigger problem is that very few schoolteachers know anything worth teaching about investment. I reckon that is why some are naive enough to be fooled by Murphy’s claims to expertise.
‘For reasons that will become more apparent over the next week’
Has he got another grant? I doubt he would be doing this for nothing.
@john77,
In the distant past I used to run redress calculations for mis-sold endowment policies. A rule of thumb was that calcs involving policies taken out before ~1985 would be no-loss; i.e., at the point we were running the comparison, they were better off than they would have been had they taken repayment mortgages.
Isn’t that almost exactly when the tax treatment changed?