Financial Literacy: When Life Doesn't Follow the "Typical" Path
Last Thursday night I attended and contributed to discussions at the the Our Hills, Our Future event.
One of the presentations included a graph showing the "typical" pathway to building wealth. It started with learning the basics, building savings, paying off debt, progressing through peak earning years, growing superannuation, and eventually moving into retirement. Sitting there, I found myself thinking: caregivers are really disadvantaged by this model.
For many people, those key years of paying off study debt, building a career, increasing income and growing super are the very years when parents and carers, who are statistically more likely to be women, are reducing work hours, taking career breaks or stepping away from paid work altogether. It's not a criticism of the graph - for many people, it probably does reflect a fairly typical financial journey.
What struck me though, was how many carers don't fit the model, and how much that can affect financial confidence, savings, superannuation and long-term financial security. When I got home, I reached out to Women's Health East, who have some fantastic resources aimed at improving financial literacy and confidence. We're exploring whether there may be opportunities to work together in the future (funding permitting), but in the meantime they have generously shared practical fact sheets and resources covering budgeting, saving, managing expenses and building financial knowledge.
This has sparked an idea. Over the coming months, we'd like to start building a small financial literacy resource library for our community. Nothing overwhelming, just practical, trustworthy information that helps people feel a little more confident navigating money, budgeting, debt, superannuation, insurance, financial rights and long-term financial security.
To get started, we've shared resources in our resource section from:
• Women's Health East
• Women's Legal Service Victoria
• Moneysmart (ASIC)
• National Debt Helpline
• WIRE
• Women & Money: Building Financial Futures
• Services Australia Financial Information Service
Money can feel overwhelming, especially when life doesn't follow the "typical" pathway. Sometimes a little more knowledge can help us feel a little more in control.
If there are particular financial topics you'd like to learn more about, let us know. We suspect we're not the only ones wondering how caregivers fit into the traditional wealth-building story.