This paper explores students’ personal financial management practices and situates these within the context of their interview accounts as they looked ahead with us into their imagined futures. The interviews were conducted at a time when many students were experiencing a significant transition, e.g. from school to university or from school to work.
The interviews ground a view that finance and money impacts on students sense of who they are and who they want to become and we go on to suggest that finance impacts their identity. We draw on a notion of leading activity (Leont’ev) to explain how students’ talk about themselves in relation to their personal finances was situated within the context of their shifting independence and preparation for work, as identification with leading activity, which for this sample was activities to do with transition to university or work. In so doing we suggest ‘leading identity’ [leading (activity) identity], a social identity constructed through participation in leading activity, as a discursive analytical category or tool, and then use this to explain a trend of students’ increased participation in personal financial management following course completion