Bloomberg Adria covers business and finance across the Adriatic region — an audience that spends its days thinking about markets, capital and monetary policy. Financial education for eight-year-olds is not the usual subject matter, which is precisely what made the conversation worth having.
The argument we keep making
Children form their attitudes to money years before anyone formally teaches them anything about it. By the time financial education appears in a curriculum — if it appears at all — the habits are already there, and you are teaching against them rather than shaping them.
That’s not a niche concern. It’s the foundation everything else in personal finance is built on, and it gets almost no attention compared with the industries that come later.
Our thanks to the team at Bloomberg Adria for the invitation, and for treating children’s financial education as a serious economic subject rather than a soft one.
Why it mattered to us
At that stage Smartmonies was early. Being asked to explain the idea to a financially literate audience forces a clarity that pitching to sympathetic listeners never does — and much of how we describe the programme today was sharpened by conversations like this one.
What we ended up building: the ten lessons →