An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the USA.

During Talk Money week, we wanted to highlight the importance of talking money with our children, to encourage them to help form good money habits for life.

With the access children now have to vast amounts of news and information, they are in a better place to be educated and informed than previous generations, and are possibly already familiar with investments such as ISAs.

Government initiatives such as the now closed Help to Buy ISA scheme, designed to encourage young people to save towards a deposit for their first home, have helped to boost knowledge, and perhaps help develop realistic attitudes towards finances when it comes to buying a home, and the costs involved.

Rob Gardner, Director of Investment Management at St. James’s Place Wealth Management, believes that financial education is one of the most important life lessons to teach children, so much so that he founded RedSTART in 2012, with the aim of teaching one million young people about the advantages of budgeting, saving, investing and giving back.

He shares his top tips on how best to teach children about money, in this article by SJP, his first tip being the importance of investing early, demonstrating how with compound interest accruing, even investing a small amount per day can generate a large figure – subject to charges and growth.

This message is reinforced in this article from BBC Newsbeat, discussing when to start saving for your retirement, ideally the earlier the better, and that we should all be aiming to invest between 12%-15% of our salary per month, for the majority of our careers.

This seems a daunting figure, especially when there are holidays, clothes and fun times to pay for, but if we want to have the enjoyable retirement I am sure we have all envisaged, then we need to commit to saving the funds required.

Our Cashflow Modelling service can help show your clients and their families how to plan for their financial futures, for more information click here.