Teens, take a leaf out of this book and realise those dreams

I grew up in a family where you could talk about anything around the dinner table. Sex, politics, religion, bowel movements — all were merrily and respectfully discussed. There was one big exception: money. It was the last taboo, the one thing my family never talked about.

School didn’t help either. School was insistent I learnt about the themes in Twelfth Night and how to calculate the angles of a parallelogram, but never managed to squeeze in a single lesson on how taxes work or what the heck a credit score is, or the basics of the stock market.

As a result of all this secrecy, my financial strategy for most of my 20s was basically sticking my fingers in my ears and yelling: “NEVER THINK ABOUT IT, IT WILL BE FINE!” Sadly, this turned out to be a pretty ineffective financial strategy and eventually I had to figure out taxes, credit and investing all on my own...