Financial Literacy

The present global financial crisis has been proven to have been caused by overzealous financial organizations and their sales staff to close deals. Whether selling below the prime interest rate mortgages to first time home owners, who could not clearly comprehend the inevitable jump in monthly payments and how to plan for it, or selling bundled investment instruments to other financial institutions worldwide as highly rated mortgage backed securities. These financial organizations along with the rating agencies and the financial regulators have successfully exposed that no one is there to protect the (non-financially educated) buyer.

The Will to Change

Today the world is a smaller place. Technology to access the internet has become more available in terms of cost of equipment and the price of service. Hence, making information stored online, e-mailing and chatting with other people, buying and selling online and even banking accessible to most of the people in the world. This is a model of thought that must be followed to equalize life styles and opportunities in every part of the world. The internet may have been started by the few, but quickly expanded on the basis that the more people that are online is the more information available. Billions of people now get news and research online, but more importantly, Millions of people add to the world’s knowledge base daily.

Value for Money?

Protesting higher prices by obstructing productivity will only send up prices. Understanding the circle of economics; costing & pricing, all inputs are outputs, profits finance development and people are both producers and consumers, will help generate the best solutions to get value for money.

Costing can be as simple as adding the values of all the inputs used to produce a product inclusive of direct and indirect human and time inputs. Pricing, which must be greater than the cost, can be much more complex; market driven like an auction, demand driven where it is a necessary input or supply driven where there are too many in stock.

Controlling Cost Of Living

Cost of living is an economic term that relates to particular goods and services consumed to maintain a minimum basic life style and differ worldwide. This translates to the cost of running your household. Tracking your finances alone, may be fine to budget for fixed cost items but associating the money with other relevant records, such as usage and time, may be the only way to deal with constantly raising prices.


Starting with the Basic Household expenses; Groceries (food & other household supplies), Health & Life Insurance, Education & Entertainment, Communication & Transport, Home Maintenance, Utilities. Most of which have recently changed from fixed price expenses to variable price expenses, because of volatilities in the pricing of essential inputs (all petroleum based products ) being no longer in a manageable range as to allow them to be absorbed into the consumers’ price. Hence, these bills are being calculated on a basic consumption unit with variable additional charges being passed directly to the final consumer. In such cases, the only budgetary control available to the consumer is to monitor the related consumption records.