MONEY

Have you ever heard of the FIRE movement? I recently came across it on YouTube. It was new to me. It apparently stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. I don’t plan to retire early. I am lucky in that I love the work that I do, and I’m in no hurry to stop. However, there are some other things that my wife and I want to do together in the future, and we don’t want to be worrying about money when we retire on a lower fixed income either. Like most in social work, I do not have shares in the stock market, a portfolio of rental properties, or really know what bitcoin even is.

So, on Friday we met with a financial advisor to explore where we are in terms of financial planning for retirement, and whether we should do their one year financial strategy coaching programme. As most of our retirement funds are in the UK (we’re lucky that I spent nearly 20 years in a Scottish local authority final salary scheme), we have some additional planning complexities around state pension eligibility and taxation.

I have to say that it was a very useful and productive meeting and I learnt and realised a lot. However, I also hate discussing our personal finances with finance professionals – even those who I am paying – and there were definitely a couple of places in this conversation that were distinctly uncomfortable. Many of us carry baggage around money, sometimes going back as far as our childhoods. My worldview and values have little in common with most financial advisers, and during our discussion there were a few potential clashes of values.

Universally, money discussions often involve some form of judgement – judging values and beliefs, judging behaviour, judging decisions, and judging competence. For too many, money conversations can also be about power, control and shame.

Most of those who we work with in OOHC live without much money and sometimes have done so for generations. Many children on the edge of care and their families live in poverty and while rarely an explicitly stated reason for a child coming into, or remaining in OOHC, is it not sometimes still a contributing factor? As we often don’t pay foster carers and tend to recruit those with the lowest household incomes, the reality is that many children, whether in kin care or non-kin care, live in poverty or near poverty, as do many care leavers. And there are even some examples out there of OOHC salaried staff being paid at or near the minimum wage.

If children in care and care leavers are to become more financially literate, do we need to as well? Or do we need need to up-skill our budgeting advisers and others in communities? And what’s your organisation’s position on the impacts of poverty, low incomes, income inequality on children in and from OOHC? Does it have one and if so how does this factor into the design of your services and case planning systems? Does your organisation sufficiently prepare individual children and care leavers to operate in a neo-liberal world? Does your organisation also campaign? Do they also ‘walk the talk’? Should they be doing more?