Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 140 posts

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#11

Post by _ah »

Kuiper wrote: post #8
volgo wrote: post #3

Some of the skills tested in the study seem more like arithmetics rather than financial skills: - "About a quarter could not work out how much change they should receive from a shop..." - "About one in three adults struggled to work out the price they had to pay.. per litre or per kilo" - "About half could not read a simple financial line graph" - "Most struggled to calculate discounts involving more complex calculat…

Especially when you consider that most supermarket labels will also include the "price per unit weight" or "price per unit volume" on the shelf with a smaller font, it becomes trivially easy to compare which bottle of soap is going to get you the most for your money. Or maybe you neglect to do this (simply opting for the container that looks the most appealing rather than optimizing for the amount of liquid per dolla…

I've started noticing some sneaky math in my local supermarket. When comparing two items, both list the unit price, but they list the price in different units. Example: A 1.4-lb package lists the price per oz, while the 0.8-lb package lists the price per lb. In every case, the intent seems too be an attempt to induce math errors and cause someone to accidentally purchase the package with the higher true unit price.

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#14

Post by jacobolus »

Kuiper wrote: post #8
volgo wrote: post #3

Some of the skills tested in the study seem more like arithmetics rather than financial skills: - "About a quarter could not work out how much change they should receive from a shop..." - "About one in three adults struggled to work out the price they had to pay.. per litre or per kilo" - "About half could not read a simple financial line graph" - "Most struggled to calculate discounts involving more complex calculat…

Especially when you consider that most supermarket labels will also include the "price per unit weight" or "price per unit volume" on the shelf with a smaller font, it becomes trivially easy to compare which bottle of soap is going to get you the most for your money. Or maybe you neglect to do this (simply opting for the container that looks the most appealing rather than optimizing for the amount of liquid per dolla…

Note: $9/month (or $7.20/month) of dish soap is a ridiculously vast amount of dish soap for an ordinary family to be using. My wife and I have been on the same $10 (?) bottle of dish soap (yay Costco) for over 5 years and it is just now running out. (Not that this affects your main point.)

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#16

Post by tysonzni »

kartan wrote: post #5

If you want capitalism to work, you need some kind of "homo economicus" that is able to look for their own selfinterest. If what you have is companies powered by complex financial systems and artificial intelligence help while consumers are not able to get a discount right, you are going to end with all money in one side of the table with the other empty handed. This is another reason to improve our education systems…

what you have is companies powered by complex financial systems and artificial intelligence help while consumers are not able to get a discount right

Yeah agreed. Perhaps products (chatbots, voice?) that simply tell people what to do can partially solve for this.

In many cases however, people have self-interests based on vastly different values (think relationship or hobby), and their instincts are good enough at approximating what they want. And while personal finance is tricky for many folks, not every decision is like personal finance which has a easily defined value function like calculating compound interest or choosing discounts. So my view is people are usually right!

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#17

Post by bramjans »

Having lived for a while in Chile (where according to the article financial literacy is below average), my experience very much agrees with this. I noticed many people struggling with basic arithmetic resulting in me having to check the change at small shops since it would often be wrong. It also leads to people making crazy decisions with respect to choosing to buy in cash or on credit (in quota). I'm not talking about household appliances that people need, but I've seen things like a person buying a 50$ blanket in 12 installments over a year. Many people would just fill up they're salary with monthly credit payments.

I've heard some people say this shouldn't be an issue with most supermarket labels including the "price per unit weight/volume". I agree this should be an obligation by law, but I feel like many people are unaware of these labels. I know it sounds crazy to a tech crowd but I'm sure many people don't compare the weight/volume with the price but instead go for the cheaper product price.

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#18

Post by MaulingMonkey »

hammock wrote: post #7
volgo wrote: post #3

Some of the skills tested in the study seem more like arithmetics rather than financial skills: - "About a quarter could not work out how much change they should receive from a shop..." - "About one in three adults struggled to work out the price they had to pay.. per litre or per kilo" - "About half could not read a simple financial line graph" - "Most struggled to calculate discounts involving more complex calculat…

How are you supposed to monitor your spending if you cannot figure out how much you paid for chicken?

Not by counting pennies. Estimate, get a rough order of magnitude - things you can actually keep in your head and get an intuition for instead of math to maybe forget in a checkbook somewhere if you record the calculation at all. Check your balances. Savings going up is good, savings going down is bad.

If you need to get detailed, or your estimates don't line up with what your savings account is actually doing, you can also harness the power of online banking records do half the work for you. I semi-recently went over three quarters worth of transactions and aggregated them by category: "Food", "Home Expenses", "Car Expenses", "Food", "Health", "Shopping", "Subscriptions", "Charity", "Unknown". (Not well covered by this exercise alone but easy enough to add to account: taxes.)

This already was overkill for me. I did nothing but fact check my gut (which was wrong on some details but right on all the macro points that actually mattered - rent, living expenses, and entertainment - exactly as you'd expect with estimates.) Monitoring total spending already tells me I'm where I need to be - with a good rainy day fund, a good savings fund growing at a good rate.

Chicken? Don't know don't care. Food totaled bellow my estimates, which were already low enough I didn't feel them worth the opportunity cost of trying to optimize. That time would be better spent learning how to better negotiate raises and hiring, or learning new career skills. Unknown? Ditto. I happened to subdivide "Food" a little when initially categorizing out of ease and curiosity into "Groceries", "Caffeine", and "Eating Out". Could've saved $633.45 between 1/1/2017 and 8/16/2017 by not buying caffeine, didn't use a lick of manual arithmetic to figure that out. Computers did it for me, and it probably wasn't worth the electrons to even do that.

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#19

Post by fnord123 »

_ah wrote: post #11
Kuiper wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when you consider that most supermarket labels will also include the "price per unit weight" or "price per unit volume" on the shelf with a smaller font, it becomes trivially easy to compare which bottle of soap is going to get you the most for your money. Or maybe you neglect to do this (simply opting for the container that looks the most appealing rather than optimizing for the amount of liquid per dolla…

I've started noticing some sneaky math in my local supermarket. When comparing two items, both list the unit price, but they list the price in different units. Example: A 1.4-lb package lists the price per oz, while the 0.8-lb package lists the price per lb. In every case, the intent seems too be an attempt to induce math errors and cause someone to accidentally purchase the package with the higher true unit price.

Just multiply or divide by 10s or 100s or whatever. It's not hard.

Oh.. oh yeah. ;)

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#20

Post by [deleted] »

_ah wrote: post #11
Kuiper wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when you consider that most supermarket labels will also include the "price per unit weight" or "price per unit volume" on the shelf with a smaller font, it becomes trivially easy to compare which bottle of soap is going to get you the most for your money. Or maybe you neglect to do this (simply opting for the container that looks the most appealing rather than optimizing for the amount of liquid per dolla…

I've started noticing some sneaky math in my local supermarket. When comparing two items, both list the unit price, but they list the price in different units. Example: A 1.4-lb package lists the price per oz, while the 0.8-lb package lists the price per lb. In every case, the intent seems too be an attempt to induce math errors and cause someone to accidentally purchase the package with the higher true unit price.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN