Managing your money for the betterment of communities. (Kitty’s team workshop)
The world has never felt more polarised and full of opposing opinions that rip friends, families and communities apart. However, there is one thing many of us can agree on - the past few years have been gruelling for our pockets and bank accounts.
Of course, there are an abundance of different reasons why. The cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine being the headliners, but behind the titles there is a wider story of how services and resources have been stripped away over decades, where we now find ourselves forking the costs, and we've never lived in such a world where we are constantly bombarded with advertising tempting us in to more and more "unnecessary" spending.
Many, if not almost all of the working classes, find themselves living pay check to pay check, with many going into debt to ensure their children have a memorable childhood.
Many have checked out of the idea of saving for things like a house and proudly stating they're living in the now with minimal consideration for ensuring their security in the future. Living pay check to pay check should be considered working to pay someone else, not yourself.
Channel 4 has recently invited Economist Gary Stevenson to talk about how during the pandemic the government handed out £407bn, according to the IMF, through the furlough scheme - but that this money instead washed through normal working people and flooded into the hands of the rich, through payments of overpriced rent, loans, mortgages and essential purchases with no or only small amounts for savings, all whilst those on high wages received their full pay package and were able to put most of their pay into purchasing more assets and stocks. This had led to property prices skyrocketing and the stock market going into a bubble.
The UK Government has now been putting the burden on working people to pay back the money the Government borrowed through more cuts to services, even though the furlough payments merely just passed through our fingers. We’re not seeing an end to austerity and inflation will continue to increase.
Assets, wealth and power will be stripped away from communities until we own nothing. The super rich will dictate how much our expenses are, how much we get paid and our government won’t have the funds to provide public services. This will happen unless the left can provide a proper alternative, where we redistribute assets and wealth, but in the meantime we can make the small changes to our lives to give us the edge and the ability to push our communities in the right direction. Therefore it is more relevant than ever to provide financial education for working people.
Bryn delivering personal finance training for the team after a busy week of laundry, we never stop!
So here at Kitty's we wanted to train our own staff first, to work together to save money and find the tools to get our savings to work for us. This is in the hope that we can create a workforce knowledgeable in how to get out of debt and manage their money and expenditure. They will then be able to better advise and assist their family and members of the Kitty's community.
The training was drawn up and hosted by our Finance Lead, Bryn, so this was very much an internal training session, however the team believe that resources that we produce must be shared openly.
The presentation and Budgeting tool files are downloadable here & here.
The budgeting tool was created in google sheets, download the file and open it in google sheets.
Any questions about the resources feel free to contact finance(at)kittyslaunderette . org . uk
Contextualising.
Average Savings per age, UK
Glancing at these figures you'll likely think, 'well, I haven't saved that amount of money', but these figures are averages massively skewed by wealth inequality and the amount of money in London.
However, it does give a clear picture that most people in the UK don’t have that much saved and are likely worse off than what the table and shows.
What we found most revealing was the figures for individual savings in the North West - 8.2% with £0 in savings, to over a third with less than £1000 in savings.
Debt per age, UK
We also discussed levels of debt per age group. These figures exclude student debt and mortgage debt. Again these are median figures, so there are many in worse positions.
Our desired destination and what makes motivates us to save.
Before we got into the main part of the training, we reflected on our goals, why we wanted to make improvements and considered what our motivations are.
If you are coming along with us, write yours down.
How do you want your life to be?
What do you want to be able to do?
What motivates you to save money?
What is money?
Let's start from the beginning to get a base understanding of the thing that troubles us, but is known to "make the world go round".
Understanding fractional reserve banking.
We want our staff (and now you too!) to understand what banks do and how they profit from holding your money, as well as how or why you receive interest on your holdings. Banks can offer out your money for a return, so the more people require loans, be it from credit cards, bank loans or mortgages, the more the banks profit. This is just one of the many ways wealth is extracted out of the working and middle classes up to the super rich.
Community/socialist motivation to save and make money.
There's a lot of stigma around making money and accumulating money around left-wing circles, however we feel the left and community minded people should shake off this feeling around money. It is a receipt of power and your ability to control assets and make things happen. Communities need this now more than ever, so anything that you can do that creates financial stability in your life is good, and anything else in excess is more likely to be beneficial to the communities around you through your ethic, value driven behaviour.
Budgeting tool
Here is the budgeting tool again if you missed it before.
Here's one guide but in the file there is an example of it being used and notes to help you out in the file above.
Work from left to right across the top
Put in your monthly income
Then your monthly expenses, add any you have extra to the ones listed.
If you have any debts, add the name of the debt and the amount you want to pay into it from the leftover after your expenses. This is extra to your minimum debt payments.
If you have anything leftover add some to the savings section under one that you like the look of. Use it in tandem with the Finance, Bank and investment tools beyond this section.
Underneath is a section about your debt, you can set the initial balance and the interest rates to what you need.
Underneath the debt section, is how your savings grow over the months then year. Again you can set the initial balance and the interest rate to what you saving tools you are thinking of using or have seen.
Review the whole budget and see what little changes you think you could make and how that could affect your debt and or saving balances.
There is a green box for you to note some goals you have and you can note some changes you want to make, we advise you start off small, small achievable changes make massive effects in the long term.
Finance, Bank and investment tools below.
Some ethical bank options:
Triodos Bank
Nationwide (Co-op)
The Co-operative Bank
