Thai teen takes on himself the responsibility of spreading financial literacy

His aim is to educate young people about the fundamental concepts of financial literacy and why it should be taught at a young age.

He is one of a few conscientious youth who actively encourage self-education about financial literacy in order to achieve more than just wealth.

In an exclusive conversation, The Nation finds out what inspires Kris and what financial literacy is all about.

 

A simple topic on dinner table

Financial matters and money affairs are regarded as taboo topics for children, but Kris considers himself fortunate to have grown up with parents who discussed these issues in his presence since childhood.

As a result, he became naturally well-disposed to learn what he regards as one of the most important life skills — financial literacy.

"Both of my parents are entrepreneurs. They would engage in open conversations at the dinner table. Hearing their stories about how they spend money, grow their investments, and scale up truly inspired me. However, when I spoke with my school friends, I discovered that they did not have this understanding. If I wanted to talk about how to invest, save, spend, and budget, they wouldn't be interested or understand it," he says.

Realising that this useful knowledge is being ignored, Kris wants to find a way to bridge this gap so that younger people or those of his age can avoid making bad decisions and engaging in bad financial behaviour.

With help from friends and the support of his parents, he began by launching an additional course at his international school to teach children and teenagers the fundamentals of financial literacy in 2021.

"I wanted to offer this financial education because it's missing in the school curriculum. Our schools teach basic subjects like maths, English, geography, and the sciences but something so important to our lives, something that we have to use on a daily basis, is not taught," he points out.

He says that around 30 students would usually attend his sessions in the beginning.

The class would cover basic topics such as how to save, how to spend, how to begin thinking about how one is spending, how to begin planning to invest and where to invest and what to avoid, how to make good financial decisions based on one's habits, and how to develop a good savings routine.

However, as he wants more youngsters to learn this crucial skill, Kris decided to launch the Super Satang website in October 2023.

"We realised that we needed to pivot online to reach a lot of the youth who spend most of the time nowadays on social media and online platforms," he says.

Along with short clips and podcasts, the web offers 10 sessions of online courses that are completely free and can be completed at a student’s own pace. The course covers the fundamentals of financial literacy that young people should know, including saving and spending.

 

The principle: Knowing your habits

While teaching the youth, Kris discovered that financial education was more than the actual financial numbers. It is largely about the emotional impact.

As a result, he and his team started to focus on the behaviour of humans with money.

"How do we behave with money? What are our emotions attached with money? And we realised that understanding the youth's money personality, mindset, and story was a critical first step before teaching them about savings and spending. So they could understand their emotions and their feelings about money before learning how to deal with them," he explains.

As elaborated in his book "Follow the Coin: A Financial Literacy Adventure", Kris says that there are four money personalities: worshipper, avoider, saver and spender.

"Money personality is to do with how they spend and what is their tendency with money. It's almost like a personality characteristic type where you could be more of a saver, more of a spender who likes to spend and indulge in many luxuries, a money worshipper who thinks that money will solve all problems and money avoider who is afraid to talk about money and ends up making a bad decision," he says.

"It's very important to see where you fit in this spectrum, to understand where are your tendencies to form bad habits in terms of money. If you don't understand what your money personality is, you won't know what you should do when you have a lot of money and deal with it. So, it's very important to see what behaviour pattern you have with regard to money in order to see where you can avoid these bad habits from forming," he adds.

It’s very important to have an understanding of these things before moving on to the more numerical aspects of financial literacy, he noted.

He points out that practically all of the financial literacy courses available on the market today view it as an iceberg, with the tip of the iceberg being the classic budgeting, saving, and investing aspects.

"But what we don't see is the emotional and behaviour where it's important to change this thinking and psychology before we learn how to take action. So, once we look at these behavioural aspects, then we start with talking about how to save," he says.

Financial literacy is the study of money and how to manage it on an individual basis. It involves not just thinking about numbers, but also learning about your conduct, personality, emotions, feelings, and money-related stories. These are the most significant aspects that are not discussed at all, he says.

"In conclusion, the three most important things about financial literacy as a starting foundation is having good stories about money, having an understanding of your emotions about money and your mindset with money before we move on to the actions of understanding how to be wise with our decisions," he notes.

 

Money matters to the youth

The principle of this critical daily skill, he insists, is not primarily about money, but about knowing yourself and cultivating the right mindset in order to become wise consumers or wise decision-makers when it comes to spending.

So, it could be said that good financial literacy entails being mindful of money management, a behaviour Kris insists should be instilled in children at a young age.

"It is very important to start with the youth so that we can have a solid foundation moving onward," he says, adding that his course would make sure that the youth understand their money goal and have that enforced so that they can keep on having clarity and the motivation to keep growing.

 

 

A way to reduce inequality

He emphasises the importance of teaching young people about financial literacy, particularly in Thailand, because it helps to reduce the country's inequality.

"We frequently associate inequality with being poor or impoverished. However, this poverty cycle can be broken if we have proper financial understanding of tools. For example, if we can find and form the right habits for saving and spending money wisely, we might be able to break free from the cycle of poverty. Just developing a few good money habits can lead to a big snowball effect later," he says.

"It's critical to start young. We focus on youth because we understand that habits are formed at a young age, and if we can start early with financial habits, we can reduce inequality over time, which is one of my goals," he adds.

 

Make financial literacy more accessible.

Aside from pursuing his dream of becoming an entrepreneur, Kris points out that in the future he hopes to do something called "profit with a purpose”.

He explains that the concept is about starting a business or finding a passion to advocate and improve social issues.

"What I want to do is use entrepreneurship as a mechanism to solve societal problems, including continuing to use the Super Satang platform to improve financial literacy by making it more accessible. So, in the future, I hope to create a financial education tech platform that will help us understand how to gamify the financial system. How can we use gaming and games to incentivise them to learn financial literacy?," he says.

He also pleads for the inclusion of financial literacy in the country's school curriculum, stating that it should be taught in all classrooms.

Kris is currently in the process of pursuing further studies at a university in the United States. Nonetheless, he intends to improve his Super Satang platform with more youth-related content, including a Thai version of the website. 

Meanwhile, he intends to translate his book into the Thai language so that more Thai youth can understand and improve their financial literacy — a fundamental life skill that Kris has learnt and wishes to share.