Your Money Matters
Barclays and Help the Aged are working together on a UK wide programme to enable older people to better manage their finances, especially in times of change.
The ‘Your Money Matters’ programme aims to improve the skills, confidence and financial situation of older people by providing basic money management and debt advice.
The objectives of the project are:
- to improve older people’s knowledge, skills and confidence to manage their money (through awareness raising sessions);
- to provide practical, individual assistance to older people to over come money management and debt problems; and
- to raise awareness of the issues of older people, debt and money management.
The UK wide programme will consist of 18 projects funded until April 2009. A debt adviser will be recruited for each project who will be supported by a team of Barclays volunteers.
Find contact details for our projects in the Your Money Matters programme.
Each project will follow the same basic process model:
- Awareness Raising Sessions - Barclays volunteers will deliver information and awareness raising sessions to groups of older people in day centres and community facilities. These sessions will give a broad overview of money management and highlight the one to one service and how it could help them.
- Financial Education - One to one basic money management sessions delivered by advice worker or volunteers. This advice can cover all forms of money management from opening a bank account and basic budgeting, to understanding chip & pin, all of which can be a barrier to older people.
- Debt Advice - One to one advice sessions with a trained advice worker either through home visits or at appointment-based drop-in centres. In these sessions, clients will be given confidential advice to develop an action-plan based upon their needs; for example, preparing debt repayment plans and budgeting advice.
- SeniorLine - Older people will also be referred to SeniorLine for information and advice on welfare rights.
As part of their work to encourage older people to take more control of their festive finances, Help the Aged and Barclays have launched a Christmas Budget Guide with advice on how to plan a festive spending allowance, save money and reduce potential waste. The guide can be downloaded from the right hand side of this page.
Your Money Matters is part of Advice and Information - empowering older people, their families and carers.
