Teens and debt!
Following up on Lou Lou’s excellent post about giving children debt advice, I noticed this great newspaper article talking about the huge expectations that UK teenagers have about their lives after university.
Essentially, the article says that a long-term study of 8,500 teenagers showed that they all believed that by 25 they would be earning GBP 31,000 a year and would own their own homes and cars. In reality, the average salary for 25-year-olds is GBP 17,817. On top of that, they actually owe around GBP 12,363 in student debt.
One of the main reasons identified for this is that teenagers are actually quite ignorant about money – many of them questioned in this study could not say which of four possible loans was the best deal. Presumably, they are also not aware of the causes of debt or how best to deal with the debt they currently have without ending up owing more.
Clearly, it’s time we started talking to our teens about money!
