skills Archives - Financial Planning in Surrey

Captain of a 737

Debbie Harris
Nov 2024 • 2 min read

Captain of a 737 (sort of) – for an hour!

In my ongoing endeavour to do new and different things this year, I recently spent an hour flying a Boeing 737 flight simulator!

My ‘children’ will tell you that I am utterly dreadful at video games as my hand-to-eye coordination is shockingly rubbish, so I went into this particular experience with the mantra “please don’t let me crash”.

Suffice to say, my visual efforts were much better than my rely-on-the-instruments efforts, but I successfully took off and landed the ‘aircraft’ which felt like a massive achievement frankly!

At the end of the session, my co-pilot (*ahem!) said that I had learned a tiny fraction of what pilots have to learn. I laughed and told him that I would not ever in a million years be able to do what they do – absolutely not my skillset!

Which reminded me that we delegate tasks to other people all the time – train drivers, mechanics, plumbers, doctors, financial planners – because they are trained to do what you cannot (or have no desire to do).

And did I crash? Well no – at least … not the airplane. The simulator software on the other hand – I managed to crash that – TWICE!

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Money management for children

Debbie Harris
Feb 2024 • 2 min read

We don’t need no education…

It is widely recognised and acknowledged that children start forming their spending and saving habits as young as seven years old; yet still we do not teach money management skills in our Primary schools here in England.

Largely therefore our children develop their relationship with money in a very organic way – largely from what they see or hear (from parents, friends, advertising, TV programmes, social media etc); which means it is basically a game of luck as to whether a child learns good habits or bad habits!

The Scout Association has seen this ‘gap’ in the education of our young people and has introduced a merit badge called the Money Skills Award (with some funding from HSBC and consultation with the charity Young Money).

In order to achieve this badge, children have to complete a selection of money-related tasks … anything from creating their own currency to budgeting for a trip.

Bear Grylls, UK Chief Scout, hopes the new badge will help Cub Scouts and Beaver Scouts develop life-long financial skills “in a way that only Scouts can by helping them build their confidence and understanding of money in hands-on format”.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the increase in use of contactless payment methods, young children typically may not see coins and notes very often anymore and instead have a sense of money coming from a ‘magic card’ that seemingly has an endless supply!

Older children are also suffering from the impact of the pandemic – with literacy and numeracy ‘falling short’; the knock-on effect of which is that millions of people have problems budgeting effectively, planning for the future and making informed decisions about their finances.

At Solomon’s we have a real and genuine desire to educate people (regardless of age) around the sensible and wise use of their resources and we often look for ways to impart useful information in an easy to understand format.

For any of our clients with young children (or grandchildren), if you would like to receive any resources from us that might be helpful – please do let us know; we are building a useful ‘bank’ of information from various sources that we could pass on to you.

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