I remember my awful and terribly unreliable Ford Laser. It JUST passed rego, the interior was off beige and the roof sagged.  Just arriving at a destination was touch and go, and I had countless breakdowns on cross-city tunnels. Once I broke down and the roadside repair man recognised me!

Many of my friends had been working fulltime for a few years and here I was starting my second year of University.

A friend of mine had just purchased a brand new, sleek and ‘sophisticated’ looking new car. It was tough, here I was studying my life away and living on just over $200 per week and here my friends were buying new things and appearing to live a life that was far from my reality.

The university years taught me to figure out how to manage my finances…it was hard, but it was some of the most formative moments of my life…

Even though most of us won’t work in the financial sector but we all still need to ‘invest’ (brilliant) into our financial literacy.  We need to have an understanding (however basic) of how money works. We need to have a general idea of how money is lent to us, and the conditions by which it will have to be repaid.

This is not an attack on banks or credit cards – they are all a fundamental part of our society. We do however need to know how they work.

As lovely as the young lady is behind the counter of your local bank branch, of however well spoken that man at phone shop sounds you need to be able to make your own educated decisions.

You can only make an educated decision if you first have an understanding of the basics.

When I was little I remember speaking to my dad and he advised me that he never ‘sees’ the money that he earns. By this he meant that the wage that he receives goes straight into his bank account. This seems pretty obvious, your boss doesn’t usually hand you cash at the end of each work day for the hours worked. Your boss doesn’t usually travel to the bank, withdraw the available funds, travel back to where you are and hand you the cash.

The money I earn from teaching goes in one day and before I have a chance to actually ‘see it’ the money is sent all over the place to pay for the various financial commitment that I have; these may be electricity bills, rent, the internet connection company or the vast array of the other payments that I have to make on a fortnightly/monthly basis. The rest gets debited of my account for food, shopping or fuel etc.

My point here is that its often easy to become detached from your finances. The easy this about spending on credit is that people have the assumption that the money that they ‘have’ on their credit cards is theirs and that your credit limit is a challenge to see if you can spend that amount – this is not wise.

If you don’t actually ‘see’ the money that you are spending, if is quite easy to become detached.

 Few things to try:

1) Give yourself an allowance for the week.

At first it may seem as though you are back in year 8 when your parents gave you pocket money. But giving yourself some spending money to last the week makes you monitor what you spend. When your spending money has run out, then it’s all gone!

2) Try paying for your shopping using cash.

That’s right, before you enter the supermarket, of the clothing store go to the ATM and withdraw the money that you need. Why you have to physically hand over cash you often realise what you are spending.

 3) Try leaving your credit card at home for a week.

You’ll be surprised how much you reach for it to shout people lunch, buy petrol, or to purchase those new jeans. Instead, in your weekly/fortnightly budget, plan to be generous.

” The final step after seeing a problem and finding a new approach is to measure the impact of the work and to share the success or failure so that others can learn from your efforts.

You have to have the statistics of course. You have to be able to show for example that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show for example a decline in the number of children dying from the diseases. This is essential, not just to improve the program but also to help draw more investment from business and government.

But if you want to inspire people to participate you have to show more than numbers, you have to convey the human impact of the work. So people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.

I remember going back to the world economic forms some years back and sitting on a global help panel, that was discussing way s to save millions of lives. Millions– think of the thrill, if you can save just one person’s life then multiply that by millions. Yet, this was the most boring panel I’ve ever been on. Ever, so boring even I couldn’t stand it. What made that experience a specially striking was that I just come from an event, where we were to do scene version 13 of some piece of software and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software. But why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving lives. You can’t get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact.

Way to do that is another complex question. Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity is being with us forever. But the new tools, we have to cut through complexity have not being with us forever. They are new they can help us make the most on our caring and that’s why the future can be different from the past.

The defining and ongoing innovations of this age, biotechnology, the personal computer, and the internet give us a chance we’d never had before to end extreme poverty and end that from preventable disease.

Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and he announced to plan to assists the nations of post-war Europe. He said, “I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio making it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clearer placement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.

Thirty years after Marshall, made this address which is 30 years ago as my class graduated without me. Technology was emerging to make the world smaller. More open , more visible, and less distance. The emergent’s of low cost personal computer, gave lives to a powerful network that is transformed opportunities for learning and communicating. The magical thing about this network is not just a collapses the distance and makes everyone your neighbour. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can bring in the work together on the same problem and it skills up the rate and potential innovation to a staggering degree. At the same time, for every person who has access to this technology five people don’t. That means many creative minds I left out on this discussion. Smart people were practically intelligence and relevant experience for though who don’t have the technology or hone

their talents or contribute their ideas to the world. We need as many people as possible to gain access this technology, because these advances are trigging a revolution about these advancements and what human beings can do to one another. They are making a possible not just for national governments but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems , see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts, to address the hunger, poverty, and desperations . George Marshall spoke up 60 years ago.

Members of the Harvard Family here in the yard — is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world. For what purpose, there is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving lives of people who never hear its name? Let me make a request of the Deans and Professors, the intellectual leaders here at Harvard. As you here new faculty, award ten year, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements. Please ask yourself. Should our best minds be more dedicated to solving in our biggest problems? Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s inequity?

Should Harvard students know about the depth of global poverty – the prevalence of world hunger, the scarcity of clean water, the girls kept out of school, the children who died from diseases we can cure?

Should the world’s most privilege learn about the lives of the world’s least privilege?  

These are not rhetorical questions. You will answer with your policies.

My mother who was filled with pride—the day I was admitted here—never stop pressing me to do more for others. A few days before I was married, she hosts to the bridal event and when she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at that time that she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message and at the close of the letter she said “from those to whom much is given, much is expected.”

When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.

In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the internet to get informed, find others with the same
interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them. Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activist. Take on big inequities.

I feel sure it will be one of the great experiences of your lives. You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with modest effort. You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Good luck.”

“Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of education opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries. It took me decades to find out. You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how in this age of accelerating technology we can finally take on these inequities and we can solve them.

Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week, and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause. And you wanted to spend that time and money where would have a greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?

For Melinda and I, the challenge is the same. How can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have. During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who are dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever, one disease that I had never heard of rotavirus was killing half a million children each year, none of them in United States. We were shocked. We’d assumed that if millions of children are dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there are interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered. If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves “this can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We ask “how could the world let these children die?”

The answer is simple and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

But you and I have both. We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism. If we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit or at least earn a living, serving people or suffering from the great inequities.

We can also press governments around the world to spend tax payer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes. If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politician, we will have found the sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.

This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge can change the world. I’m optimistic that we can do this. But I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity is been with us since beginning and will be with this until the end because people just don’t care.” I completely disagree. I believe we have more caring than we know what to do it. All of us here in this yard, had 1 time or another and seen human tragedies that broke our heart and yet we did nothing, not because we didn’t care but because we didn’t know what to do. If we have known how to help, we would have acted. The barrier to change is not too little caring. It is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

Even with the advent of the internet and 24 hour news it is still complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call press conference. They promise to investigate determine the cause and prevent similar crashes in the future. But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes one half of one percent were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took lives of the one half of one percent. The problem is not just the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.

We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new. And millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background where it’s easy to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’s difficult to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don’t know how to help and so we look away.

If we can really see a problem which is the first step, we come to the second step: Cutting through the complexity to find the solution. Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks “How can I help?” then we can get action and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares and makes it hard for their caring to matter.

Cutting through complexity to find solutions runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest impact approach, deliver the technology, ideal for that approach, and in the mean time here’s the best application in technology you already have , whether it’s something sophisticated, like a new drug or something simple like a bed net.

The AIDS epidemic offers an example, the broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives life on immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies and foundations are finding vaccine research but their work is likely to take more than a decade.

So in the mean time, we have to work with what we have in hand and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behaviour. Pursuing that goal starts the four steps cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working, and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20^th century, which is to surrender to complexity and quit.”

I actually find the financial crisis fascinating, its geeky I know, but it has huge implications about how we manage our money on an individual, national and international stage.

Over the next few weeks we’ll try and ‘unpack’ this monstrosity. As boring as you might think the Global Financial Crisis was it can provide us with some very important lessons on how we can handle our money responsibly.

We are going to have a number of guest writers discussing the implications of the Global Financial Crisis so stay tuned.

Thank you to all those people that have commented on the website or sent in email. We really appreciate your feedback and ideas.

Keep your thoughts and suggestions coming.

You can keep up to date with new content and  weekly discussions through the mycents facebook page http://bit.ly/aAA7J5 or follow us @mycents_today on twitter.  Each week we have discussions about topics at #mycents on twitter.  

You can also email directly through info@mycents.com.au

As always, we appreciate all your feedback, ideas and suggestions.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Mathew

However old you are, whether you have just received your first instalment of pocket money (lovely stuff), or if you are about to start your first casual job or you may have just got your P-Plates and need some extra petrol money, money management is extremely important. You may be studying at university and you need to buy textbooks (they are very expensive) or you could be buying your first house. Whatever the case, handling your money wisely is vital.

Steven Covey, author of ‘The Seven habits of Highly effective People’ suggests that in life we need to ‘begin with the end in mind.’ In other words we need to have goals or something to work towards. Unfortunately, the future has a habit of creeping up on us and coming sooner than we could have every imagined (sorry to sound old). Understanding how money works, how it can work for you and what you want to do with it is very important.

I agree than money is not the most important thing n the world, but I do believe that it can have a huge influence in our quality of life. We spend time (if your motivated) taking care of your body (through exercising), relaxing (to recharge ourselves) and socialising (hanging out with our friends) but what about investing (great word choice) into our financial literacy?

Over the next few months mycents is going to unpack these ideas.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Mathew Green