Mak­ing ends meet was har­row­ing for many dur­ing the pan­dem­ic as re­sults from a re­cent­ly re­leased sur­vey found that 50 per cent of re­spon­dents were not sat­is­fied with their fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion and 27 per cent said they had too much debt to deal with.

The Na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Lit­er­a­cy Sur­vey Re­port re­leased by the Cen­tral Bank this week found that 29 per cent of peo­ple did not have mon­ey left over at the end of the month while 34 per cent wor­ried about pay­ing nor­mal liv­ing ex­pens­es with 29 per cent say­ing they were just get­ting by fi­nan­cial­ly.

Ac­cord­ing to Do­minic Stod­dard, Fi­nan­cial Ser­vices Om­buds­man who pre­sent­ed the find­ings of the sur­vey its pur­pose was to ac­cess the im­pact of Na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Lit­er­a­cy Pro­gramme (NFLP) in­ter­ven­tions, eval­u­ate the cur­rent state of fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy in the coun­try, in­form the strate­gic di­rec­tion of the NFLP and make an ini­tial as­sess­ment of the pub­lic’s ex­pe­ri­ence with fi­nan­cial fraud.

Not­ing that the NFLP has been in ex­is­tence from 2007, Stod­dard said thus far 143,000 peo­ple have been in­ter­viewed.

In this sur­vey, the method­ol­o­gy dif­fered be­cause of the con­straints with COVID.

Hence, no face-to-face in­ter­views were done and in­stead com­prised a mixed method in­cor­po­rat­ing on­line and tele­phone in­ter­views and in­clud­ed 1,090 adults, 151 stu­dents and 160 SMEs.

“We worked in a con­text of neg­a­tive growth and high un­em­ploy­ment. We used the or­gan­i­sa­tion for eco­nom­ic co­op­er­a­tion and de­vel­op­ment (OECD) method­ol­o­gy and we were in the con­text of a pan­dem­ic,” Stod­dard fur­ther ex­plained.

He said apart from eval­u­at­ing the cur­rent state of fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy the sur­vey al­so gauged the pub­lic’s at­ti­tude to­wards dig­i­tal fi­nan­cial ser­vice, made an ini­tial as­sess­ment of the pub­lic’s ex­pe­ri­ence with fi­nan­cial fraud and helped to in­form the strate­gic di­rec­tion of the NFLP go­ing for­ward.

Re­gard­ing the use of dig­i­tal prod­ucts Stod­dard said the sur­vey found that 62 per cent of adult re­spon­dents used at least one dig­i­tal fi­nan­cial ser­vice (e.g. on­line bank­ing, mo­bile app, dig­i­tal wal­let or pay­ment ser­vice such as Wi­Pay, Sure­Pay etc.) while dig­i­tal adopters were typ­i­cal­ly un­der 45 years old, pre­dom­i­nant­ly from the west and cen­tral re­gions, and were hold­ers of a first de­gree of high­er.

Over­all, he not­ed that fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy in Trinidad was 69 per cent while To­ba­go record­ed 67 per cent.

On the lev­els of fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy he said 35 per cent of par­tic­i­pants had high fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy com­pared to 44 per cent with low fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy.

Peo­ple with low­est fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy scores were be­tween 18 and 24 with lim­it­ed sec­ondary school ed­u­ca­tion.

“The high­est lev­el of ed­u­ca­tion was at Form Three and they were gen­er­al­ly of the low­er so­cio-eco­nom­ic group,” Stod­dard not­ed.

Those with high­est fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy scores were over 35, fell in­to a high­er so­cio-eco­nom­ic group and had a ter­tiary lev­el ed­u­ca­tion.

Of the com­po­nents which were mea­sured, in­clud­ing knowl­edge, be­hav­iours and at­ti­tude, Stod­dard said the low­est score was ob­tained for knowl­edge of fi­nan­cial prod­ucts and ser­vices.

“This tells us that we need to make peo­ple more aware,” he said.

Re­gard­ing the un­banked this showed no change from pre­vi­ous years.

“We mea­sured the un­banked pop­u­la­tion and in 2007 we came up with 21 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion or one in five per­sons be­ing un­banked. This year we came up with 19 per­cent.

“So giv­en that the mar­gin of er­ror which is plus or mi­nus three per cent, we could safe­ly say there was no change in the un­banked pop­u­la­tion,” Stod­dard said.

The sur­vey al­so took in­to ac­count the Small and Medi­um En­ter­pris­es (SMEs) sec­tor.

Ac­cord­ing to Stod­dard it showed that on­ly 40 per cent of SMEs pre­pared fi­nan­cial state­ments an­nu­al­ly while 32 per cent agreed that their busi­ness ob­jec­tives were rea­son­ably on tar­get and 37 per cent felt it was not on tar­get.

The sur­vey in­di­cat­ed that 52 per cent of busi­ness­es have neg­a­tive sen­ti­ments about the state of the econ­o­my in the last five years.

Al­so, at least four in 10 busi­ness peo­ple hold pos­i­tive sen­ti­ments about their en­ti­ties and for their fu­ture.

The younger gen­er­a­tion was al­so in­stru­men­tal in the sur­vey which helped to gar­ner the per­spec­tive of young peo­ple re­gard­ing fi­nan­cial mat­ters.

Ac­cord­ing to the sur­vey, par­ents de­cid­ed how chil­dren be­tween 10 to 14 years should spend their mon­ey, while old­er stu­dents from 15 to 17 years tend to make mon­ey de­ci­sions for them­selves.

So what do they spend mon­ey on?

Sev­en­ty per cent of stu­dents spend their mon­ey on snacks.

The sur­vey al­so showed that 33 per cent of stu­dents made a list of items they wish to pur­chase.

How­ev­er, the find­ings showed that fe­males were not on­ly more like­ly to do so but they al­so stick to their list.

On pru­dent spend­ing, the sur­vey showed that just about six in 10 stu­dents in the 15 to 17 age brack­et com­pared prices be­fore buy­ing and do­ing on­line price checks.

These el­e­ments among oth­ers from the sur­vey, Stod­dard said were then ex­am­ined fol­low­ing which sev­er­al rec­om­men­da­tions were made so that T&T can achieve greater fi­nan­cial pru­dence; key of which re­mained pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion.

Sug­ges­tions in­clud­ed a com­pre­hen­sive over­haul of NFLP con­tent re­sources to en­com­pass mod­ules on us­ing dig­i­tal fi­nan­cial prod­ucts and ser­vices as well as de­tect­ing and avoid­ing fi­nan­cial fraud.

Oth­er rec­om­men­da­tions in­clud­ed to con­duct at least one en­tre­pre­neur­ial work­shop per quar­ter to as­sist ex­ist­ing and po­ten­tial small busi­ness­es and to de­vel­op and dis­sem­i­nate con­tent specif­i­cal­ly de­signed to treat with choos­ing ap­pro­pri­ate cred­it prod­ucts and debt cop­ing strate­gies.

Fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy ought to al­so be­gin at an ear­ly age.

Hence, there are al­so plans to tar­get par­ents and oth­er non-tra­di­tion­al stake­hold­ers (e.g. teach­ers, TTUTA, PTAs) to sup­port the stu­dent pop­u­la­tion with ap­pro­pri­ate fi­nan­cial knowl­edge and even li­aise with the Chief Ed­u­ca­tion Of­fi­cer to work out the longer term ob­jec­tives of hav­ing fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy em­bed­ded in the cur­ricu­lum.

Gen­er­al rec­om­men­da­tions in­clude im­ple­ment­ing a more struc­tured pro­gramme of ad­ver­tis­ing and pro­mo­tion to in­crease aware­ness of the NFLP, de­vel­op ad­di­tion­al in­ter­ac­tive tools (bud­get­ing, in­vest­ing, risk man­age­ment) for use by tar­get pop­u­la­tion seg­ments and work with Gov­ern­ment agen­cies that pro­vide so­cial sup­port to en­sure that re­cip­i­ents have ac­cess to and make use of the ser­vices of­fered by the NFLP.