In his book “Outliers”, Malcolm Gladwell believes it takes 10,000 hours of practice before someone becomes an expert in a skill. Practising for an hour a day, it will take over 27 years to reach 10,000 hours. For something as important as financial literacy, where matters of finance impact everyone of us, can you really afford to wait 27 years before you become good at it?
The earlier you start reading, thinking and practicing financial concepts, the better equipped you will be in adulthood when you start earning, protecting and investing your money. However, financial literacy is not taught in many schools and very few children are exposed to financial concepts at a young age. Further, a lot of material and news written on the topic of finance is usually designed for an older audience. To use a sporting analogy, if you want to improve, you have to compete against someone better than yourself; but this is not the case if the difference in skill level is too great.
We view financial literacy as being comprised of 3 main areas:
– Budgeting and Managing your personal cash flow. If you are spending more than you have, we can’t even begin to talk about the next step, which is
– Understanding investment products. You have to know the risks inherent in each type of investment and which is best for your unique situation.
– Awareness of current affairs relating to finance. In our increasingly interconnected world, things which happen on the other side of the globe can have a tremendous impact on us.
We will be posting and discussing articles which cover these 3 main areas and we hope that over time, all our readers will become financially literate and obtain financial freedom.