Introducing Our Family

We mainly struggled because we operated without a budget or any controls in place with regard to spending. We definitely learned financial responsibility the hard way, and it was a tough lesson to learn.

We would both love our kids to benefit from what we learned but without the pain. We also had little input from our parents with regards to managing finances. We were both from relatively poor financial backgrounds, and the answer to the question, “Can I have a……?” was quickly followed by the answer, “no”. There was plenty of love in both of our childhood homes, but there certainly wasn’t plenty of money.

Constantly being told “no” was our parents’ way of letting us know that they didn’t have the money to purchase what we wanted. They made tough decisions for us. When you meet someone and get married or move in together with someone, parents aren’t usually there to make those tough financial decisions for you. As the saying goes, you have to stand on your own two feet. If you haven’t learned financial responsibility for yourself, then it’s easy to get into financial difficulty. Especially with the amount of cheap credit currently available.

Our parents did a brilliant job of raising both of us, but I don’t remember being taught how to manage my finances by my parents. School also never provided much in the way of financial education either.

I see Go Henry as an enabler in helping me to teach my children how to be responsible with their finances. They will hopefully enter adulthood understanding how to budget, how much is in their account and how to save for the things that they need.

My children are both still relatively young, but what is brilliant about Go Henry is that they can be given a very restrictive set of rules to operate within. The aim is that as they grow older the rules can become less restrictive until they are capable of managing their finances by themselves.

I work in technology for a living, so I have a good understanding of the technology that is currently in development. Very soon, smartphones will have microchips in them that will enable us to purchase things just by waving our phones in front of a machine. This will be done without entering a pin number in the same way as contactless payments work at the moment.