How financial literacy can help people in changing times

Analysis: Developing the skillsets to be more financially acute can only increase people’s resiliency in changing times

HBO’s latest Game of Thrones spin off A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms centres around all thing’s knights, the role they play in society, specialists who spend years as a squire, training their sword and shield until they are knighted. The show depicts the knighting process taking place with the lines “In the name of the warrior, I charge you to be brave. In the name of the father, I charge you to be just. In the name of the mother, I charge you to protect the young and innocent.”

Yes, the show is a fictional story but let me ask the question, would the skills of a knight be applicable today hundreds of years later, the use of a sword and shield? We could ask ourselves the question is our skill sets going to be applicable in 100 years or even 5 years in this time of technological change with A.I.

Developing the skill of financial literacy can be one path to giving some resilience in this changing technological age. One benefit of financial literacy can be seen in the Financial Times Annual Stock Picking Competition. The Financial Times runs a stock picking competition each year. Essentially the premise is their readership, and expert writers pick five stocks and the goal is to see which persons gets the highest value from their portfolio of stocks at the end of the year.

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From RTÉ Radio 1’s Drivetime, will the stock market crash in 2026?

It’s a form of fantasy football league but focused on investing in the stock market. The winning contestant portfolio for 2025 wasn’t an expert writer, but a farmer from Hampshire in the United Kingdom who was quoted as saying “There is very little money in farming”.

Financial literacy is much more than investing. Financial literacy is a language, how you budget effectively, save, get the most out of your money, manage your taxes to engaging with financial institutions. Financial Literacy is such an expansive area, where do I begin?

FT FLIC is a charity in the UK providing free financial education classes online, currently focused on UK secondary schools, but the lessons are applicable to all ages providing vast educational resources on personal finance. The charity quoted “Most young people do not receive meaningful financial education in the UK, and recent research shows that 23 million adults in the UK have poor financial literacy.”

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From RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland, are young people in Ireland being given the best start in life when it comes to financial education?

The FT FLIC Learning Hub offers as described on their platform: “Free financial education resources for teachers, mentors, youth workers, parents, guardians, community educators and caregivers learning alongside young people. We offer curriculum-aligned lessons, at-home learning support and upcoming adult resources to build financial skills across all age groups”.

Within FT FLIC Learning Hub, adult learning resources offer free videos from budgeting to managing debt to investing; covering how to deal with risk and potentially build wealth overtime. The brief structured video lessons allow you to learn and study at your own pace and fit into your busy schedules.

Hederman in the Opal and the Pearl noted that “the future is not something out there which we step into as into an already designed space. The future is ourselves as we choose to become”. We all have the capabilities of developing a financial toolkit particularly with the recent announcement from Minister for Finance Simon Harris on the development of an Irish savings scheme.

Overall, in this changing world of uncertainty, developing our skillsets to be more financially acute can only increase our resiliency in these changing times.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ