When you consider all the other things much younger children are already doing online by then, these age limits seem increasingly out of step. Claer Barrett’s two-year-old niece gets to grips with a pain aux raisins — after having tapped Claer’s bank card to pay for it Certainly that’s what the mortgage market is pricing in if you’re somebody who’s looking to refinance your home loan. Sarah, is there a risk that the Bank of England has overdone it?

I’ve never thought it is a subject that should be introduced later. It’s such a part of our life. You know, the reason I think I’ve been good with money is that we didn’t have any when I was tiny and it was a big conversation in the house and it wasn’t in a worrying way. It was just like, what are we gonna do to build a better life? And I think that was a real gift because I didn’t learn about money, you know, I just absorbed about it. And I thought, it’s not even in the school curriculum. And how can this lifeblood of the way our entire society works, how can that not be on the school curriculum from the day they first step foot over that school threshold? So I thought, well, well, there’s a gap. It needs to be written. Whether or not I’m the person to write it or not, we’ll see. Do you have any practical tips about how people can pay more attention to where our investments are going and the kind of businesses they’re funding and the kind of attitude our banks might take to all of this? I have to say the book is a little generous with this interest, but partly because I want them to feel good about it and get engaged with it rather than doing that thing like your nephew did, which is, oh really?And just to remember to look around the whole piece, understanding what it actually means to run that business, what it would take, what energy it would take to run that business, and to remember the risks that were involved in that. And I’m not putting people off because, you know, it’s given me a wonderful life. It’s created the best of times for me. So I would, you know, I want everyone to do it. I want everybody to have a brilliant time. But timing is very, very important. And you’ve got lots of timing levers. You’ve got, is it the right time for the side hustle, to scale it up? Is the economy sort of faltering a little bit? And is my personal situation, is the timing right on that? And there will be a sweet spot in there. You know, it won’t all be perfect, but there will be a sweet spot that all of the indicators come together to say, OK, now’s the moment. I don’t know. So when I was 19 . . . no, earlier, 16, I went to business, left school at 16, didn’t do A-levels, went to business college, and my thesis at college was on climate change. No, you’re allowed to use that. (Laughter) Now you’re normally the one listening to the pitches in Dragons’ Den. But when it comes to making greener investment choices, greener consumption choices, what would be your pitch to Money Clinic listeners? I don’t think I really understood how your student debt interest rate could vary over time and how it would be affected by inflation. I’m not sure if I’m right, but I kind of assumed that your student debt interest rate was kind of, was fixed over the rest, over the 20 years.

FT Commenter Tarma: We should be introducing finance and taxation as part of early, primary school education and onwards. Introduce the good reasons for understanding why we have money and how we use taxation in democratic society. Business and money are part of normal life. So it was worth it in the end. So keeping on that sort of credit theme, we’ve already got some questions from viewers about credit cards.Welcome to Money Clinic, the weekly podcast about personal finance and investing from the Financial Times. I’m Claer Barrett, the FT’s consumer editor.

So keep learning, keep reading. And thank you very much, Jay, for starting us off with a fantastic question tonight. Now, we had another question, I think, from over this side of the room. Somebody called out earlier about student debt. Would the person who said that like to put it in the form of a question to the panel perhaps? Ah, you’re a very good sport. Yeah, So it’s about it’s about work and technology. My working title is ‘Human Robots’. So it’s exploring both the kind of dystopian and hopefully more utopian possibilities about what’s coming towards us.And we’ve got masses of questions about investing. But there’s one here. You know, should you think about paying down your mortgage rather than taking out an Isa? See, I can’t do that because I don’t find, I don’t judge things in best and worst. Because I make bad decisions, I make bad investments. But you don’t have to get everything right. If you strive to get everything right, you won’t invest in anything because nothing is known. You know, you’re making your best guess at whether or not this is going to work. You know, do I, using all of my knowledge or my judgment, has this got a fair chance? So when I get it wrong, to me, that’s just part of the investing process. You know, I’ve just got to get more right than I get wrong. So getting it wrong, I don’t like getting it wrong. Nobody likes losing their money. Sometimes I’ve got it wrong because I simply can’t work with the people. And I don’t mean I can’t work with them in a sort of, you know, falling out sort of way. Just that we have different desires. When you’ve got an investor on board, you know that you’ve got a slightly different path. You’re looking for a return on their investment and sometimes you find that the person that you’re helping really didn’t want what they thought they wanted. They actually want an easy life. They don’t want me going, look, I can get you into, you know, Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s. Laughter) Mattered at all would be helpful, I think. Yes, I do. I actually, I get frustrated because I honestly, the opportunity in the green economy, it’s happening. It’s going to happen. Listen, if we’re completely wrong about climate change, it doesn’t matter. We get clean air, we get cleaner river. You know, it’s just so much good coming out of it. It’s going to happen. Why on earth wouldn’t you embrace that as a business opportunity? If you couldn’t care less about the climate, why wouldn’t you embrace the green economy? There is so much new opportunity and an opportunity to bring in people with such diverse skills and such diverse knowledge and create jobs that have never existed before. It’s exciting. Yes. So definitely in the UK, and in fact you mentioned entrepreneurship as well, I mean in the UK since the financial crisis, the last one in 2008, there’s been a huge increase in the proportion of people who are self-employed, and that ranges from people being Uber drivers or riding for Deliveroo to people setting up their own kind of independent, one-person consultancies. There’s been a real kind of mixture of people that have decided to become self-employed. But yeah, I feel like the other structures in our economy haven’t necessarily caught up with the fact this is becoming a much more common way of working. So yes, things like getting a mortgage are much, much harder than they need to be, probably. I think the yeah, a lot of our kind of financial institutions are still kind of wedded to the notion of most people having a sort of traditional 9-to-5 job. But actually the world of work hasn’t been like that for quite a long time. The 7-11 age group is really crucial from a financial education perspective, but also for developing their own independence around cash,” says Alison Rose, the bank’s chief executive.

My parents have really said the need-or-want mindset. They’ve, we really adapted to that. We do have space for leisure, but mostly just what we need. So I think that’s really important to have: that need or want mindset. Yeah. And when it comes to goals, how do you set them? I mean, we’ve talked a little bit about, you know, setting intentions and things like that.No, absolutely. They’re there to kind of shake you out of your normal thought process and suggest something new. No, when I was a personal finance journalist, my credit score was absolutely appalling. So I totally get that. (laughter)