Finance
Incredible year-long spending experiment exposes mistakes you’re probably making
Financial behaviour specialist Emma Edwards, founder of The Broke Generation, is sharing her radical personal finance experiment: a whole year without buying a single item of clothing.
No new outfits, no second-hand finds, not even rentals. What began as a no-buy challenge soon became a powerful lesson in self-worth, resilience, and the surprising freedom of living with less.
In the exclusive extract below, Emma shares the six buying patterns we get trapped into thinking we actually need.
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The impact of our consumption habits creates an environment where we’re cornered from every angle. We have a collection of clothes that don’t work together, don’t make us feel good and don’t allow us to express ourselves the way we want to, which leaves us looking externally for what we’re not getting. The problem is, when we look externally, we buy more and more of the same.
Unravelling that idea of what can happen when we’re in a ‘yes’ state, a state of openness to consumption even though our intentions might suggest otherwise, got me curious about some of the unhelpful buying cycles I’d been stuck in. I really leaned into understanding how I ended up with the wardrobe I currently had, and what I could learn from the mistakes I made over and over again.
I realised that if I could establish the mistakes I was making and the ways I was buying the wrong things, I’d stop feeling compelled to buy more and more over time. Here are some of the patterns I uncovered in my wardrobe, and that I’ve seen in others’ too.
Once I liked something in one colour (often black), I’d giddily run out and buy it in another colour, thinking I was making some kind of ultra-smart decision and capitalising on what I loved. I’m going to give you a piece of advice now that I hope you’ll remember for many years. If you ever utter the words ‘I’m going to go and get this in another colour’ – run. It’s a trap. You probably won’t like the other colour, and it’ll just sit in your wardrobe and collect dust.
There are certain things in my wardrobe that I struggled to wear confidently outside of one specific outfit silo. Usually, this is a sure-fire sign that I’d bought it in a very specific context, like copying or replicating an outfit I’d seen someone else wear.
Finance
Low-income Chinese girl aces gaokao, inspires live-streamers offering help
A girl from a disadvantaged rural family in central China topped this year’s gaokao, attracting numerous live-streamers eager to finance her education, which she declined.
The home of 18-year-old secondary school graduate Han Yaping in a Henan province village was recently bustling with live-streamers.
This attention came after Han achieved an impressive score of 699 out of 750 in the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam.
She has received offers from China’s two leading universities, Tsinghua University and Peking University.
Han’s accomplishment is particularly remarkable given her family’s impoverished circumstances.
Her mother suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory arthritis affecting the spine, preventing her from working. Her father, who earns a living through farming and odd jobs, serves as the family’s sole provider. Han also has a younger sister.
Finance
UK financial regulator publishes landmark AI review
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a landmark review on Monday that proposes recommendations to regulate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial decisions made by consumers.
The review, titled the Mills Review, anticipates that both consumers and firms will start delegating “more financial decision-making to AI systems,” including for agreements, initiating transactions, and executing decisions “within agreed parameters.” One of the key findings of the review outlined that while AI can help bridge advice gaps and “support growth,” there remain risks “associated with fraud, cyber security, and consumer harm.” Conducting the review, Sheldon Mills highlighted that “AI can also amplify risks: bias, discrimination, exclusion, opaque decision-making (particularly when multiple AI models interact), misleading or hallucinatory advice and erosion of consumer trust.”
The review stated that presently, one in five adults in the UK are “already open to AI making decisions for them,” particularly when decisions feel “complex or high stakes.” It found that roughly 26 percent of the population “trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice” with little awareness that such platforms provide no “formal routes to recourse” or protections.
Overall, the Mills Review identified four areas that it anticipates will be impacted by AI in the financial sector: “the transformation of firms,” “new consumer journeys,” “a reshaped competition landscape,” and “amplified financial crime and cyber risk.” The FCA projected the shift in how consumers and firms consult AI to take place by 2030.
The Mills Review put forth seven “priority” recommendations to be considered by the FCA Board. It recommended that any transitions to autonomous AI models be monitored and that regulatory frameworks and perimeters be adapted and secured. The review called for the strengthening of “system-wide coordination and oversight,” the scaling up of the FCA’s AI Lab to enable it to support AI models and innovation for agentic finance, and an “AI-enabled agentic supervisory model” to be built and adopted. Finally, it recommended that a trusted “public-interest AI-enabled financial capability service” be developed.
The FCA announced, in the press release, that it will launch an AI “good and poor practice publication” in late 2026.
Finance
Fayette County Public Schools Board of Education approves audit contract, new finance director position
LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – The Fayette County Public Schools Board of Education approved a one-year audit contract capped at $131,750 plus $225 per hour during a virtual meeting Monday, along with a new finance director job description.
The contract is with Mauldin & Jenkins Certified Public Accountants, an Atlanta-based firm, and covers the 2025-26 fiscal year and the restatement of the 2024-25 fiscal year and ancillary services through FY 2029-2030. The work is set to be completed by Nov. 15.
The board approved the contract in a 5-0 vote.
Audit contract details
Interim Chief Financial Officer Kyna Koch said the cost is already accounted for in the district’s budget.
“And is actually less than we expected given our current situation — we were thrilled with the bid,” Koch said.
Koch said she believes this is Mauldin & Jenkins’ first school district audit in Kentucky, but that the firm works with school districts of more than 100,000 students throughout the Southeast.
“Quite frankly when I spoke to the folks at KDE they were thrilled because we’re running kind of short of auditors who want to do school district audits — so all around I think this was a win-win for everyone,” Koch said.
New finance director position
The board also approved a new job description for the position of Director of Finance. Acting Superintendent Dr. Bill Bradford said the title will replace two associate director positions.
“Which will not only save the school district money but it’s also going to streamline our work and align internal controls to make room for a more efficient unit,” Bradford said.
Koch said the position will be posted as soon as possible following the board’s approval.
Closed session
The board went into closed session for more than an hour to discuss pending investigations that could lead to employee discipline. When the board returned, it took no action and adjourned the meeting.
Copyright 2026 WKYT. All rights reserved.
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