Everyone's being told to tighten their financial belts, from the Ministers (10% cut in entertainment allowances! How cruel!) to the average man in the street. It's actually quite interesting to note some of the comments from people interviewed in The Star recently.
One key missing ingredient, I think, in our education system is basic financial planning. How to budget and adhere to the monthly spending budget, calculate credit card interest rates, loan rates, etc. A lot of young adults (yours truly, included, to be honest) go crazy with their first credit cards and find themselves in a financial hole very early in their working lives and spend way beyond their means.
Would it make sense to have a curriculum designed jointly by AKPK and the MoE to be taught in secondary schools in this area? Then at least we can help inculcate good spending habits early.
PS - this download is pretty good - you can use it on Excel or anything that can open .xls files (like OpenOffice)
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This 'financial management education' thing should be attacked from all sides.
a) As you said, start at the schools - primary and secondary
b) Continue at all tertiary institutions and make it a compulsory subject
c) Make it as part of an organisation's training. Here there can be different levels - beginner, intermediate, advanced - depending on the needs/ wants of the employees. Public and private sector employers should do this. It can be a sit-down training session with handouts (I don't mean donation, I mean 'training material') given at the end of the session.
There are plenty of CFPs, CFAs etc around. Finding people to come up with a relevant curriculum should not be too difficult.
This way not only can kids learn at least a little bit about managing finances but adults can too.
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