Just a bit of fun today, with a short personal finance quiz (I could have called it a test but that sounds definitely not like fun), that got sent to me the other day by Totally Money. They got around 40 of us blogger types to have a go at it to see if we really do know our ISAs from our elbows.
Before we look at what score old muggins here got, along with where I came in the top 40 1, why don’t you have a crack at it yourself?! If you enter before midnight on the 14th December 2014 you can enter a prize draw to win an iPad 2 as well! The link to the quiz is here:
No cheating please (remember you are only cheating yourself, and you won’t have a better chance of winning the iPad with a better score as it is a random prize draw!)

The Results are in!

Now I know you’re all dying to know how I did!? No?! Well I’ll tell you anyway. I did “OK” with 11/16 which I was a little disappointed in at first… especially as this alerted me to the fact that, apparently, I am knocking around with the Kim Kardashians of the World on the personal finance knowledge front…
Kim Kardashian vs The Firestarter, an intellectual showdown to end them all!!!!

Kim Kardashian vs The Firestarter, an intellectual showdown to end them all!!!!

Woe betide! It took me a while to gather myself and get on with my day after that, but better news came a few days later when the full results came out, and it turned out I didn’t do so badly after all, scoring an 8th place finish, which I would have taken before attempting the quiz! Here is the final top ten table:
Ranks Name Nationality Score Time(min)
 1
David @ YoungAdultMoney.com US 15 03:23
2 Paula @ affordanything.com US 14 05:15
3 Adam @ MoneyBulldog.co.uk UK 14 07:56
4 Ryan @ themilitarywallet.com US 13 07:54
5 Evan @ MyJourneyToMillions.com US 12 01:55
6 Graham @moneystepper.co.uk UK 12 04:49
7 Jonny @ thefinancewand.com US 12 10:55
8 Andy @ thefirestarter.co.uk UK 11 03:48
9 Victoria @ Frugaltrial.co.uk UK 11 03:51
10 Brian @ Debtdiscipline.com US 11 04:10
Well done to David who smashed it in 3:23 and got the top score, and to Adam at Money Bulldog who won the coveted UK #1 spot. As you can see my strategy was to go for speed where possible and it looks like it half paid off, although I think I did rush a couple of the questions I got wrong that I really should have got correct.

What did I learn

As well as being a bit of fun, this was also an exercise to help us improve our knowledge, and it certainly alerts us to the subjects we might need to brush up on. In my case these areas were:
3. Building credit history – in fact I should have known this one, I put “Being on the electoral role” whereas I know that doing so is vital to getting a good credit score, so not sure why I put that as an answer!
5. Regulator of credit card industry – admittedly I had a bit of a guess on that one, I knew it had an acronym similar to FCA/FSA or something along those lines, but guessed the wrong one.
6. Level of UK household debt – I put £114 Billion. Obviously I have greater faith in the people of the nation than I should have – correct answer £1.4 trillion!!! 🙁
7. Mortgage payback calculation question – This was one I admittedly rushed. I simply can’t do this sort of question in my head but had the rough intuition that you’d end up paying roughly double what you borrowed back, which turned out to be quite spot on in the end as the answer was £866,157 (from a mortgage for  £400,000). However I looked at the initial figure of house cost which was £500,000 so selected £966,157 as my answer, D’oh!
10. Which company does not hold a credit file: I put “Call Credit”, the correct answer was “EquiScore”. To be fair I have never heard of either of those, so no wonder I got that one wrong 🙂
How well did you do?! Let me know your score below, if you care to share it! Thanks!

 

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Notes:

  1. I always dreamed of having an entry in the top 40 charts as a kid, but it wasn’t quite like this. Funny how things turn out eh? 🙂
  2. I was very wary of adding “win an iPad” to the post title due to the recent I’ve been hacked debacle… don’t want to p**s off “the big G” any further than I (inadvertently) probably have already!