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Study : over 85%of the lower secondary and high school students save money
Over 85% of the lower secondary and high school students save money, and 90% of them learned only in the family notions of financial education, according to a study made by the Romanian commercial bank - BCR regarding the level of financial education of the students in Romania, in the programme The Money school. Out of the overt 8,000 participants in the study (students aged between 11 and 19 from the entire country) almost 90%learned in the family how to organize their money. Even so, 70% of them would like to take part in the courses for financial education and consider as useful its inclusion in the curriculum.
The family is both the main source of money for the young people involved in the BCR study and the main source for financial education. Among the most frequent advice the students received is ‘money is made with effort and goes easily’(45.92%), ‘if you are careful with money, you will not have debts’ (18,44%), you don’t have to spend on a whim’(13,65%) and ‘ if you save, you won’t be stressed’ (13,51%).
The answers of the students show the fact that the majority follow the advice they received, 47.10% of them stating that they try to save money once a week. Even if the biggest part of the participants to the study confessed that they save money once a month, the problem appears when it comes to the level of organization and management of the budget: the majority of the students keep their money in the wallet and have no plan how to organize it, and the biggest investments are for clothes and footwear.
Among the main results of the study, BCR mentions: 84% of the children learned in the family how to manage pocket money, 66% of the students use pocket money for refreshments at school, more than 85% save money, 45% use the savings for clothes or footwear, 17% for gadgets and the rest for presents, hobbies, education, sporting activities and other activities, over 60% of the students do not know what the budget of the family is, and almost 50% of them do not know how much their family spends in a month.
The study was made between October and November 2019, on a sample of 8,329 interviewees, students of public schools, boys and girls aged between 11 and 19. All studies made over the last two years, irrespective of the source, show that the Romanians are the last in financial education in Europe. The last study made by the World Bank at the level of the European Union and presented during the second edition of European Money Week of 2018 placed Romania the last out of 127 countries with a percentage of 22% while the European average is 55%.