MoneySmart Week is on later this year – in September, to be precise. From September 1 to 7, to be even more precise. It’s a week when the message about the importance of understanding basic financial concepts comes down from the ivory towers and hits the streets.
It has a website – www.moneysmartweek.org.au – and the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed this is a very similar name to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) website, www.moneysmart.com.au. This is not a coincidence.
MoneySmart Week is run by an outfit called Financial Literacy Australia Ltd, a private company with a board made up of largely the same people who comprise the Australian Government Financial Literacy Board (minus ASIC commissioners). It uses the MoneySmart brand under licence from ASIC.
ASIC does not provide financial support to the company, but it has provided in-kind resources to help run MoneySmart Week.
It’s a tremendous initiative – it ran for the first time in 2012 – and has the potential, if properly supported, to bring some really important issues to the attention of a very large group of people that really needs to hear them.
In truth, the messages that MoneySmart Week wants to get out there are probably a little more basic than those that most financial planners deal with. But that doesn’t mean that financial planners can’t help spread the message. And while there’s a clear directive that involvement in MoneySmart Week should be focused on spreading the key messages and not harnessed as some kind of marketing or sales opportunity by participants, there’s a very clear potential benefit for financial planners to get involved.
Bear with me for a moment
A recent report in UK newspaper The Telegraph quoted a survey by vouchercodes.co.uk, which purported to conclude that “debt” and “poor financial planning” were among “the top turn-offs for those choosing a potential partner”.
These rated above “physical attractiveness” (which perhaps explains why successful internet entrepreneurs can find partners) and “bad personality” as reasons for relationships failing to launch.
Putting to one side for a moment the bona fides of this kind of survey, the 1900 single British people who responded sent a fairly clear message: when it comes to establishing a meaningful relationship, a reasonable grasp of even basic financial concepts seems to be important.
This is supported by the MoneySmart website itself, which reports the results of another survey – this one by Relationships Australia – which found that financial stress is one of the main reasons that relationships fail. And the costs – financial, emotional and to society overall – of failed relationships have been well documented.
So it seems that there’s more than enough reason for astute financial planners out there to use MoneySmart Week to begin to forge connections with local communities, to do something that is of genuine use to those communities and to establish a reputation as the local “money guy/girl”.
You teach a young couple today how to budget or how to manage credit card debt and who knows where that could lead years down the track?
And, even if it doesn’t, MoneySmart Week is a golden opportunity for financial planners to contribute something to the communities that sustain them.
