Every so often money stress flares up as a public issue, as now, and the response almost always includes the claim that people need to understand money better. Teach it in schools, run campaigns, lift everyone’s financial literacy.
It’s a perfectly reasonable idea, and for years I accepted it too. But I’ve slowly come round to thinking it misses the point.
And I say that as someone who, on paper, has no excuse. I understand money reasonably well, but if I’m honest, that understanding hasn’t reliably turned into “me always staying on top of my own”. A few weeks ago I wrote about a transaction that hit our bank account and just sat there, unexamined, for six months. Knowing how it all works was no protection at all.
Part of it is that “knowing you should do something” and “actually doing it” are two different things, and the second doesn’t follow from the first. I’ve written about that gap before. You can understand compound interest perfectly well and still never get around to moving your savings into an account that actually pays more of it.
And in any case, I’d argue that financial education has, at best, a mixed success record. Decades of programs and campaigns, and it seems to me that the needle has barely shifted; what gains turn up tend not to stick. I won’t go into the research here, but it’s not really an encouraging case for the idea that the answer is simply more teaching.
The part that really gets me, though, is more basic than whether all this financial education works. It’s that we don’t ask this of people anywhere else.
Think about how we handle the other complicated parts of adult life. When you have a legal problem, you don’t put yourself through law school; you get a lawyer. When you’re unwell, you don’t sit down with a medical textbook; you see a doctor. The whole point of these people is that you don’t have to become one of them. Nobody thinks less of you for using them, and nobody suggests the answer to a tricky diagnosis is a national campaign to make everyone their own GP.
Expertise, in almost every part of life, is something you get access to. Not something you’re required to become.
Money has been the odd one out here. And there’s a reason for it. Real expertise about your money, a person who knows your particular situation and can tell you what to do about it, has always been expensive and scarce. Accountants, advisers and private bankers exist, but they’re for people with enough money to be worth the fee, and mostly for the big moments in life rather than the day-to-day running of things. For everyone else, for the ordinary business of staying on top of your own money, there has never really been anyone to turn to. Not across the board. So the only lever left was to try to turn everyone into their own expert. Financial literacy became the answer because, until recently, it was the only answer that worked at scale.
But that’s changing. For the first time, having an expert on your side, looking out for your money, is becoming possible for most people, not just the people who can afford a professional.
In practice it would be a tool that looks quite mundane, which is rather the point. Got a charge you don’t recognise? Instead of ignoring it or letting a low-grade worry sit there for six months, you could just ask, and get a straight answer. Got a question about whether this month you can handle an unexpected bill? Again, just ask.
The thing is that the help would be there when you reached for it, and out of your way when you didn’t.
That’s what we’re building Lucie to be. Something designed to understand your situation and help you act on it, without asking you to become an expert yourself. The plainest way I can put it is a line we keep coming back to: you shouldn’t have to be good with money to be good with money.
That said, none of what I’ve just said should be read as an argument against learning about money. If you find it interesting, learn all you want. Understanding your own finances is absolutely a genuinely good thing I’d never talk anyone out of.
My point is narrower: we shouldn’t make becoming an expert the price of staying on top of our money, when most people don’t have the time, the inclination or the need.
For decades the finance industry has tried to “fix money” by making people expert at it. I reckon that the more useful thing, now that it’s finally becoming possible, is to give them an expert instead.