When Zaiesha Raniya first started learning about the importance of savings in Year 9, she faced an internal struggle. A self-confessed spendthrift, “spending and buying things has been my weakness since primary school,” she says. But with encouragement from her teachers and her mother, the Xavier College student from Ba has flourished.
“I didn’t actually care about money, it was just paper or stones for me,” she says. “It would come and go and I didn’t value money at all.” Now in her final year of high school, Zaiesha has blossomed into a more fiscally responsible young adult. She makes regular deposits into a savings account towards her tertiary education.
The turning point for Zaiesha was learning how her mother had saved “cent by cent” to buy mother’s day presents in her youth. This struck an emotional chord with the then 14-year-old schoolgirl, who decided to do the same for her mother. Another turning point for Zaiesha was opening her own bank account. She remembers going to the bank with her mother, who encouraged her to fill out her own forms to open an account.