Life Skills: Finance

We have developed these pages as a brief introduction to help you start down the path of developing your financial skills. However, ECSA is not a financial advice service, and we do not provide financial advice. The purpose of these pages is to give you a brief introduction to the information readily available and provide a basic understanding of the topic. Please use the information in these pages as a starting point to help give you a clear direction for doing your own research.

At ECSA, we know many of you have wanted more information and resources to enable you to start working on your finances and so we have built these finance life skills pages:

Banking: This page goes over the various types of banks and bank accounts, explaining not only what different accounts offer and how to best utilize them to improve your circumstances.

Bills: This page helps organise your bills and explains what priority bills and non-priority are. We also developed a tool for you to use to sort out any extra bills.

Budgeting: This page explains how to create a budget and why they are an important tool for creating a stable financial situation.

Credit scores: This page explores and explains credit scores, what they are, how they are calculated, and covers some ways to start improving your score.

Reducing costs:  This page is focused on reducing your costs so it covers different ways to reduce costs, as well as ideas on ways that you may not have thought of, such as comparing energy suppliers.

Saving: This page is geared towards helping you come up with a way to start saving that works for you - we go over tips on how to start saving as well as pointing out pitfalls to watch out for.

Shopping Tips: Learn the tactics that shops use to make you want to spend more than you initially wanted to.

Understanding Interest: This page covers the differences between APR and AER. We've highlighted additional resources that show you how interest is calculated so you can make sure it works for you.

We ALWAYS recommend if you are facing financial difficulty you should seek professional advice/ guidance, we provide links to websites and contact info for such services on all of our pages.

Financial Services:

Money Advice Service

National Debtline

Citizens Advice Service

StepChange Debt Charity