Ryan Bridge: The path to improving financial literacy

I see ACT is flying a kite on free money for school kids.

Which sounds odd given the party's aversion to free lunches.

Seymour's talking about giving each Year 11 student, 5th form, $500 each to invest. It'd cost $30 million a year and could be funded via the KiwiSaver subsidy.

Mike’s Minute: Financial literacy in schools? About time

Regulars will know school and I were never really that close.

It was a means to an end, and the end couldn’t come soon enough. The means was the skills required to get out into the world and get on with it.

One of the things it did help with was economics. I found it genuinely interesting and did quite well in it.

Stephen Agnew: Financial education needs to start in the home

Even as an economics student at university, I remember heading into town on a Friday night knowing what I needed to pay the bills before I could spend on socialising. But despite having the financial literacy to know better, Monday could still sometimes begin with a trip to the bank to ask for an overdraft extension.

So it was encouraging to hear that financial education has become a political talking point ahead of this year’s election. Both Labour and National are promising to deliver compulsory financial literacy classes as part of the school curriculum.