The first is education. We were not taught to manage our money in school and that makes us make decisions by trial and error or with the recommendations of other people (which usually do not have good financial results). The education we have teaches us to earn money and the environment to spend it, but not to invest it. So we buy things that we think are investments but aren’t, like lifestyle items. And if they ever invest, they do it without understanding what they are doing and after losing their money, they stop investing.
The second obstacle is language. The language of money is simple but for some reason people in the financial industry make it more complex. When you don’t understand the language, you don’t know if you’re winning or if you’re losing. Therefore, people prefer not to play the game.
The third is the context. In order to invest, you need your income to be higher than your expenses to be able to allocate a part of your income to your investments. However, if we review the socioeconomic structure of the country, it is very easy to see that a large part of the population is in survival mode, another smaller part is in lifestyle mode and the minority has the necessary slack to explore investments.
However, the good news is that developments in the environment have made investing easier and easier for this simple reason. Some of these facilitators are:
The access to the information. Since we do not have a formal education on finances, people often look for how to solve their money issues on their own. Social media and access to information have made this conversation much easier. Personally, after more than a decade of teaching on this subject, in recent years I have detected a wave of new people interested in learning more about money management.