Trin­bag­o­ni­ans are not prop­er­ly plan­ning for life af­ter em­ploy­ment.

When the re­sults of a fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy sur­vey were pre­sent­ed be­fore the start of the pan­dem­ic it was re­vealed that 68 per cent of peo­ple over 60 had no per­son­al or oc­cu­pa­tion­al pen­sion plan.

This as the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board has re­vealed a grow­ing deficit amid a lim­it­ing pop­u­la­tion of con­trib­u­tors due to T&T’s age­ing pop­u­la­tion.

With the grow­ing gap be­tween ex­pen­di­ture and the age­ing pop­u­la­tion and peo­ple liv­ing longer, ex­pen­di­ture over 2017-20 grew from $4.7 bil­lion to $5.3 bil­lion com­pared to con­tri­bu­tion in­come of $4.6 bil­lion.

The Fi­nance Min­istry and the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board (NIB) are cur­rent­ly ex­am­in­ing rec­om­men­da­tions to grad­u­al­ly in­crease the pen­sion age from 60 to 65 and add self-em­ploy­ment to the sys­tem to help sus­tain NIB’s fund.

“For many years the NIB has rec­om­mend to Par­lia­ment that the re­tire­ment age be in­creased to 65 to en­sure that pen­sion­ers re­ceive their ben­e­fits in the fu­ture. De­spite this fact a con­fused and mis­chie­vous Op­po­si­tion MP is claim­ing that this is Gov­ern­ment’s idea not the NIB’s,” Im­bert tweet­ed.

The num­ber of con­trib­u­tors in the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Sys­tem (NIS) in 2021 was record­ed at 446,116, in­creas­ing by 41,919 con­trib­u­tors, or 10.4 per cent, from 404,197 in 2020, while the num­ber of ben­e­fi­cia­ries in­creased by 0.9 per cent from 204,613 in 2020 to 206,569 in 2021.

Im­bert stat­ed that the re­turn on the NIB’s in­vest­ment port­fo­lio was an im­pres­sive 14.2 per cent with the NIS Fund grow­ing by $2.1 bil­lion to $30.8 bil­lion.

Speak­ing to the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian, Fi­nan­cial Ser­vices Om­buds­man Do­minic Stod­dard said the re­sults of a new fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy sur­vey will be re­leased soon.

The NFLP was es­tab­lished in 2007, when the “eco­nom­ic con­di­tions were far dif­fer­ent than we are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing now,” Stod­dard said.

En­er­gy prices were high and we were hav­ing a “good time” Stod­dard ex­plained.

“What was recog­nised was that large seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion were not ad­e­quate­ly prepar­ing for re­tire­ment. A large seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion was en­gaged in con­sump­tion spend­ing and not enough was be­ing set aside in sav­ings and prepa­ra­tion for a rainy day,” Stod­dard said.

“And it was felt that fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy, be­ing a life skill, l would es­tab­lish this pro­gramme at the cen­tral bank where we are not sell­ing any prod­ucts,” he said.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­sults of the last sur­vey pre­sent­ed about 44 per cent of TT na­tion­als had a low fi­nan­cial ca­pa­bil­i­ty.

And about 21 per cent of peo­ple who took the sur­vey had no ac­count with a fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion.

“When we iden­ti­fied the prob­lem of poor per­son­al fi­nan­cial man­age­ment we had to tack­le it,” Stod­dard said.

He said this was tack­led with short, medi­um and long term goals.

To deal with that Stod­dard not­ed the NFLP sought to help adults sub­sti­tute cheap cred­it for ex­pen­sive cred­it.

“We would help to guide them in ac­quir­ing a home and con­sol­i­dat­ing debt and per­haps in­vest­ing and so on,” Stod­dard told the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian.

Stod­dard said to help ad­dress the is­sues at its root they opt­ed to fo­cus on the youth.

“We want­ed to get the youth of the na­tion at a very ten­der age for them to un­der­stands things like prop­er­ly dis­tin­guish­ing be­tween wants and needs, not mak­ing im­pul­sive de­ci­sions where mon­ey mat­ters are con­cerned, and al­so be­cause we be­lieve that fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy is a life skill you don’t just pick it up along the way,” he said.

Stod­dard said some peo­ple may be able to get a head start be­cause of the fam­i­lies but there should be no un­fair ad­van­tage for such a crit­i­cal is­sue.

“Some peo­ple may be for­tu­nate to grow up in a home where par­ents are busi­ness peo­ple and mon­ey man­age­ment is al­most in­nate,” he said.

“Not all of us are that for­tu­nate but those of us who do not have ac­cess to that we want to make sure they learn along the way the dif­fer­ent skills that they would need be­cause once you grad­u­ate from school some­body is ready to give you a cred­it card and if you don’t know how to man­age a cred­it card you find your­self in a lot of prob­lems,” Stod­dard said.

He said the Bank hoped to help teach the youth to deal with is­sues of home own­er­ship, sav­ing and in­vest­ment.

“We should have struc­tured guid­ance. In fact one of the things we be­lieve at the NFLP is that fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy should be in the school cur­ricu­lum, it is when you build it in there we would know that every­one com­ing out of high school at the form five lev­el at A Lev­el have cer­tain ba­sic fi­nan­cial skills in or­der to han­dle their fi­nan­cial af­fairs,” he said.

To help the younger pop­u­la­tion the NFLP al­so re­cent­ly launched a new app which al­so con­tains games.

That is tar­get­ed to the those aged be­tween 7-11.

“We thought that learn­ing mon­ey mat­ters, even though mon­ey is a se­ri­ous thing, we should make it fun, we should make it in­ter­ac­tive colours, we want­ed to en­gage and in­ter­act with them,” he said.

“We thought that a learn­ing en­vi­ron­ment when you are ac­tu­al­ly play­ing you would be pick­ing up fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy con­cepts, mon­ey con­cepts with­out be­ing aware that you are ac­tu­al­ly learn­ing,” Stod­dard said.

The launch co­in­cid­ed with Glob­al Mon­ey Week, Stod­dard said the NFLP is al­so pro­mot­ing en­tre­pre­neur­ship to help peo­ple tack­le the un­em­ploy­ment is­sue in the coun­try.

“The NFLP pro­gramme has been giv­ing en­tre­pre­neur­ship pride of place in the re­cent past. We have al­so brought on spe­cial­ist in­struc­tor to help push en­tre­pre­neur­ship,” he said.

“We be­lieve as a coun­try as we go thought tough eco­nom­ic times more and more of cit­i­zens will have to use their skills and tal­ents and cre­ate a job,” Stod­dard added.

He said that pre­vi­ous­ly the think­ing was to push chil­dren to study hard in or­der to find a hob.

But that this think­ing now needs to be amend­ed.

“We want peo­ple to look at their skills and see what they can mon­e­tise,” he said.

“Peo­ple need to look for ways and I think the pan­dem­ic has put peo­ple out of work and re­duced hours, see how im­por­tant that is to sup­ple­ment house­hold in­come,” Stod­dard said.