What Love Actually, Harry Potter and Die Hard can teach you about festive finance: Sarah Coles

The good news is that if you choose carefully, those movies can actually help you tick something else off your enormous to-do list to. Because there are some Christmas films with handy money lessons, which can help teach your family more about their finances. In some cases, you’ll need to start a casual chat about the plot points to make sure it goes in. In others, you can sit back and help everyone master their finances without having to lift a finger – which makes a nice change from all the other festive traditions.

Mary Poppins is about savings

This children’s classic is a useful lesson in how hard it can be to save when you’re faced with spending temptations. In their ill-fated trip to see their dad at work, Jane and Michael inadvertently spark a run on the bank, thanks to Michael’s desperation to buy bird feed rather than open a bank account.

Movie money lesson

It goes to show how hard it is to make sensible decisions and compromises every day. It’s why if you force yourself to make an active decision to save every month, you’ll be making life way too hard for yourself. It’s much easier if you set up a direct debit to come out of your account at the start of the month, before you have time to factor it into your spending plans.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is about life insurance

Admittedly it’s not a particularly magical plot point, but early in the first film, just after learning he’s a wizard, Harry is taken to the bank to see that his parents have left him a pile of gold – giving him the freedom to buy everything he needs for his new profession - plus all the chocolate frogs his heart desires.

Movie money lesson

In the real world, the odds of being murdered by an evil wizard are lower, but parents need to make plans just in case the worst was to happen. This includes making a will and naming guardians, but it’s also vital to consider life insurance. This provides affordable protection for your children, and if it is written in trust, it will fall outside your estate for inheritance tax purposes.

Love Actually is about care planning

It falls fairly firmly into the camp of less upbeat storylines in the film, so you’d be forgiven by getting sidetracked by the octopus. However, one thwarted love affair is between Sarah and Karl, because Sarah’s life is devoted to the care of her brother Michael.

Movie money lesson

When someone you love needs care, it will always turn your life upside down. However, if they’ve made plans to cover the cost of care, it can make a life-changing difference. This is far easier said than done, because the costs involved can be catastrophic. However, it’s still worth having money put aside for less acute care needs. Another option is to consider your pension as the basis of your care savings. You can build a pot, withdraw only the income from the investments, and leave the lump sum intact if you need it later in your retirement.

Aurthur Christmas is about pensions

In this animated romp, Santa is retiring, and his eldest son has taken the reins for Christmas. There are plenty of comic developments – and an elf sidekick – but we gradually come to realise his Christmas-obsessed younger son is more suited to the job.

Movie money lesson

We learn pretty early on that Santa is ready to give up the top spot. We also get to meet his eccentric dad, who passed the job on decades earlier. We usually think of being Father Christmas as a job for life, but it’s a useful reminder that nobody can go on forever. We all need something put aside to take care of us as we get older, and it’s essential that we run our pension savings through an online calculator regularly, to make sure we’re on track.

Trading Places is about speculative investments

Spoiler alert, but the climax of the film – excluding the bit with the gorilla – is where our heroes convince the bad guys that the orange crop is going to fail, so they head to the commodities market to buy orange futures – in order to buy low and sell high when everyone else hears about the crop failure. However, when they place a big order, all the other traders think they must be onto something, so they buy futures too. A frenzy breaks out and they massively overpay for them. It means that when the real, normal crop is revealed, the price plummets and the baddies lose a fortune.

Movie money lesson

The thing that tends to get overlooked is that in this scene, all these traders are overpaying, so they all lose a fortune. It’s what happens when a market is dominated by speculative traders, and could be a handy watch for anyone considering getting into Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin. There’s no intrinsic value to these currencies, so the price is driven entirely by speculation. It means a social media post can drive the price up, and a follow-up post can drive it down again. It’s why this is essentially a form of gambling, and nobody should put any money into Crypto that they aren’t prepared to lose.

Die Hard is about phishing

Leaving aside whether Die Hard is a Christmas film (it is), it also contains useful reminders about the security of our passwords. In one horrible scene Holly Gennaro’s boss Mr Takagi is held at gunpoint and asked for the access code to the vault. He refuses, and pays a horrible penalty. If he hadn’t, it would be a fairly short film involving thieves quickly helping themselves to the cash and disappearing.

Movie money lesson

In reality, it’s not that hard to persuade us to part with the passwords, PINs or account numbers that grant access to our cash. It’s very easy to panic and fall for a call, email or text out of the blue, warning us that our accounts are under attack and we need to move to a ‘safe’ account. It’s also easy to fall prey to scammers who claim to be from the bank, asking for you to ‘verify your details.’ In these cases we could all take a leaf from Mr Takagi’s book and refuse to part with our personal information. In real life there’s no price to pay, just the relief that comes from knowing you weren’t taken for a ride.

Time for a tax return

It might not feel like the ideal time to file your tax return, but 22,060 people submitted their tax return between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day last year – and 141 people filed between 11pm and midnight on Christmas Eve, so it was out of the way before Christmas.

The fact that there may be more down-time during the Bank Holidays means there’s an opportunity to check you’re claiming all your allowable expenses, and for any additional tax relief. You can also get to grips with any filing mishaps you’ve run into during the year, and even find a spare moment for some tax planning. More to the point, if you get it out of the way, it means you don’t have to worry about the January deadline during the festivities.

SARAH COLESHead of Personal Finance and Podcast Host for Switch Your Money OnHeadline Money Expert of the YearHargreaves Lansdown