From self-help books to money gurus on TV, the focus is, and always has been, on us as individuals. This is very important, money management is a very important life skill, but it isn't the whole picture. We've been conditioned to think that government will always have our best interests at heart, we trust them, as the public servants they are meant to be, to create the conditions for health, work and opportunity - a good life for every tax paying citizen. But the truth is something quite different.

In the School of Money Mentors, we will be discussing the systemic issues that are preventing the majority of us of obtaining a healthy financial life - to understand the game and to know what we're up against, might give us a fighting chance in a rapidly changing world.

We have a responsibility to ourselves and society, to contribute to a better future.
But we also have a duty to challenge systems that are rigged against us, and if you think for one minute that I'm talking about some kind of movement, you'd be wrong. Western economic systems have been extremely successful over the last 150 years; not perfect, but the best solution we've come up with so far.

But, like many things, without transparency: systems that involve lots of money, people, influence, opportunity, complexity and the passage of time - are vulnerable to coordinated self-interest - we see this today in our political and economic systems - rigged in the interests of the few.

When we allow and ignore increased structural obscurantism (jargon in other words) and when we fail to carry out regular checks and balances, and when we fail to educate ourselves and our young people in the language of money, we risk drifting further and further away from a financial system that is fair for all - to a one that favours the financially and politically powerful by default.