Wildcard Wednesday - financial jargon

A BBC news story from earlier this month on confusing financial jargon provides the inspiration for today’s extension activity. The National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) is concerned that many consumers struggle to understand the choices that they are making with regards to selecting pension plans and knowing what to do with them when the time comes to retire, just because the wording used in the policies is full of jargon.

This activity has a number of strands to it. First, watch the video from NEST which demonstrates consumer confusion, and then take the quiz where you can work out whether you’re better than the people interviewed for the video in interepreting financial jargon! You can then take a look at NEST’s pension phrasebook to consolidate on any terms that weren’t understood in the quiz.

For the most able students,this can then lead on to discussion of the spending/saving patterns of households over time, and the theories that help to explain it (e.g. Modigliani’s lifecycle hypothesis, Duesenberry’s relative-income hypothesis, the Keynesian absolute income hypothesis, Hall’s random walk model and so on)

The next part to the activity requires students to develop their own video, quiz or phrasebook, relating to financial matters or current affairs that they think particularly affects them. So, this could be car insurance policies for new drivers, student bank accounts and credit cards, anything relating to the tuition fees hike/EMA removal or anything else that they think is relevant to their age group!

Not only will this activity stretch able students when they attempt to put jargon into understandable language, but it might also prove very useful for their classmates in any upcoming decisions that they need to make!