Break the Taboo! #FinancialPlanning Day
By Teamspirit on Friday, 6 January 2017
According to data from Facebook, January 9th is the day of the year when we have the most conversations about financial planning. Women and people aged between 25 and 54 are the two demographics in which these conversations are most prevalent.
What is most surprising about this is how far we have come in just a few years. Before the rise of social media and the sharing culture it has engendered, survey after survey would gloomily report that we would rather talk about our intimate health than our personal finances.
Parents and schools alike were berated for not teaching children the fundamentals of financial numeracy. Financial advisors and solicitors needed to hone their counselling skills to encourage open, honest conversations between families about the simplest of financial matters. Debt used to rank higher than death on our list of conversational taboos.
Now here we are in 2017, openly discussing our personal finances, sending friends ‘I’m broke’ emojis to gracefully decline social invitations, sharing money-saving tips and tax avoidance strategies on public forums.
But we’re not just having conversations about our finances, we’re also interacting with our money and exercising our decision-making power to an extent we never did before.
Handy apps are helping us manage our money on the move. Robo-advisers and chatbots are helping us make friends with finance in a whole new way and turn financial planning from the dullest thing on our to-do list to something that in terms of the experience, if not the outcome, is more engaging and worthwhile.
