Some highlights from presentation to RI Sec 4 students

This is the second time I am presenting to RI secondary 4 students who are taking a gap semester with a finance specialisation. 

Before you start levelling allegations that I am an elitist, know that this is a good business move because if my material is good enough for RI it's good enough for any other school. I actually have a different set of slides for neighbourhood schools (which I spent a lot more time on because it can make such a big difference to kids from lower-income families).  My RI material has gone through two iterations and generally can demonstrate financial concepts by reference similarities with MOBA games. 

RI's strength is not that it has more resources from the government, its strength is that it can cut through the bureaucratic red tape that will allow the private sector trainers access to their students. This is a valuable testbed for new ideas - if someone from RI does not understand your slide, you should quit the training business. In my presentation today, I actually struggled to explain the 4% safe rate of withdrawal to them so I had to do it twice, which means that there's plenty of room for improvement when I conduct training elsewhere.

As usual, I did not earn a single cent from my effort - in fact, I donated two books to the winner of my quizzes so this is more like a pro-bono project I do when I am not conducting classes. 

I'm sharing some useful data I collected anonymously today. 

Here's a breakdown of the weekly pocket money they get, this can be a useful guide for parents to follow. Like every institution, most the kids have a fairly normal stipend but one of them does draw a bigger allowance. 

I also polled the method their parents wire the money to them, and was actually surprised that cash is still king. I'm still not seeing major fintech adoption here. 

As for my experience, RI definitely has a particular signature style quite unique to them that I don't see when I present to other schools or polytechnics. RI boys start out really hesitant, like solving a H3 level Physics problem, but once they establish a steady tempo, the really smart questions start to arise.  

Some caught me completely off guard.  

I was asked by a student what's the best way to use one's time after exams to which I replied that for kids my generation, we really played throughout our holidays and doing something "useful" was out of the question. Then I started feeling really shitty about the quality of my answers, so I did an entire discussion on mental models and why they are best off learning about how to find models to cope with ambiguous situations that they will encounter in real life. This led to an entire discourse on parents, tuition and why this is actually a prisoner's dilemma. Not satisfied with that, I told them, mental models from Literature can be useful in finance too, so I told them about Jane Austen's Mr Darcy and why Victorian women value their spouses from their income from their estates.

In summary, these are really intense kids who are not really just book smart. I have a question that I did not cover in my lecture notes and most of them got it right.

The question was keyed off the idea that your success in life is largely determined by how you invest your time outside work. 

Whoever taught these kids obviously did something right.

Of course, I could not resist making a quip about recent political events, I told them to believe in themselves even though someone in the Cabinet called their school a lousy school.