There’s a lot to know about money, taxes, payslips among other things but apparently there’s also a bunch of stuff that I didn’t know. Considering I never learnt about money at school, this is not surprising.
My name’s Georgina Polydorou, I’m 18 and have just started an apprenticeship at MyBnk as part of a Digital Youth Academy and LeSoCo College scheme, where I’m learning about Communications, helping design graphics and trying my hand at movie making.
Money and enterprise are complicated things to teach young people, a good way to get my head around how MyBnk do it was to see it in action.
Money Twist is MyBnk’s flagship award winning financial education programme and I popped along to a session at Nower Hill High School with a dozen 13-year-olds. I learnt a lot of new things about money that I actually had no idea about before for example:
- Money is made from thin cotton, I knew it wasn’t made from paper but I didn’t actually know the exact material it was made of and now I know.
- I found out the exact amount of money you have to make to get certain taxes, for example if you earn over £150,000 you have to pay 45% in tax, I didn’t know the actual numbers for this but now I do.
- I learnt a lot about the different wages for particular jobs in more detail, teachers are paid £24,000 a year whilst barristers are paid £32,000 a year and bankers £50,000 among other different wages for other jobs.
- From the other students, I learnt some new ‘slang words for money’ for example ‘Gwop’ and apparently a lot of them think if you have a lot of money then a certain supermarket is a good place to spend it.
- The students had a lot of interesting ideas to do with money, for example when asked what they’d cut out of taxes, one student said pensions as the people getting them were old anyway and therefore didn’t need the extra money, a very controversial attitude towards pensioners indeed. Another student said that all of the tax money should be shared equally between members of his household.
What did the young people think?
