We should be teaching financial literacy through fiction
Imagine, sometime in the not-so-distant future, your mum is thinking of going off-grid to escape the government’s new retirement age of 85. She’s 65 and was looking forward to stopping now. But she can’t. The new retirement age is compulsory because finances don’t allow anything else. You realise you will eventually be in the same position. What can you do? Do you help her to disappear so she can live out her retirement comfortably?
This storyline is taken from a collection of seven short stories, imagines our near future but seen through a financial lens. Storytelling is an ancient tradition which teaches us about the world around us. The same should be true for financial literacy. The collection aims to teach people about how finance affects society, by exploring concepts like the future of children’s education, retirement ages or climate change.
If we look at life expectancy, for example, there continues to be incredible advancements in technology and medicine that could see today’s generation comfortably living over 100.
The implications for us as individuals, nations, and society are significant – almost too substantial to comprehend. Do we work longer and still have a long healthy retirement?
Current projections suggest our retirement savings could run out 20 years before we die. So who picks up the cost of paying for our longer retirement? What about those at the other end of the job market, the younger population – how do they access the workplace, and how much will they have to pay to keep the pensioners going?
These are huge questions to grapple with. Trying to engage a wide range of stakeholders with them so they can contribute to the debate, is even more challenging. Unless, perhaps, through the art of storytelling.
Many people are alienated by overly-technical language when it comes to their personal finances. Even more so when talking about cultural issues surrounding finance.
So we decided to use stories. Our financial future, sustainable investing, even “debt slavery”, are explored in the collection, titled Upshot, to engage a broader audience.
We don’t have enough collective knowledge and agreement on how these issues will affect society and our planet, and the role we can all play in tackling them.
Everyone’s financial journey is personal, and how we interact with money is personal too. However, it’s essential to recognise our “rational” investment decisions are often underpinned by emotions, so we need to connect with people on an emotional level.
Too often, we see financial advice from governments and companies that is cold and matter-of-fact, and recipients are more likely to just file it away rather than actively engage with it, never mind act on it. As financial experts, we should help make the concepts accessible and easy to understand and talk about. Make us less anxious about money. We think a story is a great way to do that.
In the words of Lauren Beukes, acclaimed science fiction writer, who helped curate the stories: “Other animals dream, some apes play pretend, but as far as we know, humans are the only animals that tell stories. Stories are for passing on knowledge, communicating ethical values, trying to understand the world and who we are in it.”