You don't just wake up one day and your flabby gut has disappeared and you are suddenly a champion batsman. I wish! I won't tell you what it takes to become a legendary batsman who can hit a cover-drive, on the up, off a ball traveling at over 150km/h between two agile fielders to the cover boundary for four. I do that very well in my dreams. Herschelle Gibbs does that better than anyone in world cricket. I suspect Gibbs will tell you (after a couple of clever chirps) that it takes skill and plenty of practice. The same will be true of teaching children 'financial fitness'. Without starting young, guidance and plenty of practice, they are just not going to wake up one day and everything is financially 'hunky dory'.

So here's the reality, if you think your child is being taught (at school) the basics of getting ahead financially, then seriously you need to 'catch a wake up'. They are not! There is not a big enough difference between what you and I learned about finances and running a business and what our youngsters are learning today at school. So how do you expect them to get these vital skills?

We are happy doing the same old thing the same old way. It takes certain stories that emerge, mostly out of the media that shocks us back to reality. Crime and Education are prime examples of this. A story breaks in the media, and suddenly we wake up out of our subconscious haze and we 'catch a wake-up'. We have all heard about the problem of crime, I am sure it lurks somewhere in our subconscious, but it takes a shocking story to bring us back to reality. We get angry and then it subsides until the next story. The same is true of education. We hear more and more stories about the challenges teachers constantly face in our classrooms. These stories worry us for a period of time and then they go away. We might think, "I'm sure my child will be ok, when they leave school and they wont be like me when I left school."

Just between you and I, I was completely clueless about handling money; I was completely broke for the first 3 years of working and I wasn't alone. Like me the majority of young adults entering the job market will not have the basic financial knowledge let alone the understanding of how to start and run a business and to invest wisely.

A survey published by VISA in the United States reveals the following and I guarantee the statistics will be very similar for countries around the world: