Financial literacy is the silver bullet for social mobility. I write to you from Mayfair. Look at a Monopoly board. Mayfair and Park Lane - 100 years later remain affluent and Old Kent Road - pretty much is not (I've been, and seen it too).
It takes even longer and should not to equalise human disparity in social mobility. At school, I didn’t fear the rich kids would beat me in the exams - they didn’t and wouldn’t. Their bellies were full. I feared the hungry kids, the poorer ones, like me. They wanted to win. That’s the injustice. Lack of opportunity of choice.
Make your children financially literate. Teach them about savings and compounding and tax-free savings like Government bonds and ISA and even shares.
One financial website said they will do the following and I can do no better than repeat, edited, their words:
Improve financial literacy within Black communities.
Statistics show that financial literacy is not equal across all races and ethnicities, which means we need to take a more targeted approach to enact change. In the coming weeks, we will launch a series of articles around specific financial challenges facing Black people to help them navigate those challenges. We’ll also be actively seeking organizations with the mission of improving financial literacy in Black communities that we can partner with to amplify their impact, with details that we’ll share here as we know more.
Improve awareness of the importance of diversity in companies.
We will encourage other companies to focus on diversity and inclusion by holding them accountable, as we hold ourselves accountable. We will highlight where companies, particularly financial product and service companies, stand on anti-racism, diversity, and social responsibility through our existing reviews, profiles, and analysis so that our readers can make educated purchasing and investing decisions.
We as a community must not sit on our laurels. We have done much. But our children must not merely inherit wealth, they must earn and build it and the answer remains financial literacy. Our community has suffered huge injustices and is a role model for fighting its way out with little resource, but I fear is in too many silos – as communities often become.
I grew up in Armley, Leeds. To London I am on outsider. I fear as an outside observer of London the pockets of wealth in my community tends to congregate. As someone who has live in St John’s Wood, Kensington and Westminster, I am not saying all communities do not congregate – but it is easy to be in a bubble unaware from whence we came. I live in Chiswick now – but wait – it counts as the London Borough of Hounslow and the socio-economic profile of Hounslow is ‘my kinda people’. Not meaning to be patronizing – but hedge fund managers as much as anyone need to get out of Mayfair. We all need to get back to Armley is what I am saying.
Or as the cool kids said two decades ago – ‘keep it real’.
By Alpesh B Patel
