Vision Urbana After School Program

This week I started teaching a seven week personal finance course for middle school girls through the Vision Urbana After School Program. I’m serving as a volunteer with High Water Women (a non-profit organization for women in the hedge fund and financial services industry) and this is my second year teaching this course to middle school students. Earlier this week I met up with my co-teachers and fellow HWW members, Christine and Monica to discuss the curriculum and outline for our first class. After sharing ideas for ninety minutes, I left our meeting feeling prepared for our first class and confident that over the next seven weeks we were going to have a strong, positive impact on these kids.

As I approached the entrance on Thursday afternoon, a fight between a school boy and an older male was being broken up by school security outside the school gates…not the welcome I was expecting! Our class consists of about twelve middle school girls. They are a set of sassy, chatty ladies – but they are absolutely adorable. Walking into the room I felt like each of these ladies – going through puberty, endless peer pressure, non-stop homework and raging hormones - looked at us “grown-ups” thinking, “you have NO IDEA how stressful it is being me”!

Session 1: Decision Making, Opportunity Costs, Wants and Needs, Peer Pressure and Influence, Income and Jobs

I kicked things off with introductions, talked about High Water Women and asked them what they thought financial literacy was. Then we got them moving around with a human scavenger hunt icebreaker. Monica went through the decision making process, and how sometimes there are opportunity costs for our decisions. Next Christine had them share what they had bought in the last week – and separated them into wants vs. needs. My favorite was the young lady who argued that buying hair scrunchies was absolutely a need, “Imagine you wake up in the morning and your hair looks like a mess!” All her peers agreed that that scenario was completely unacceptable, and thus, scrunchies were indeed a necessity.

In the discussion about peer pressure, the ladies were able to define the term easily, but I was surprised that the group didn’t express that they felt like they made spending decisions based on pressure from their friends. After working with older teenagers in high school, it seems like that age group are more likely to buy certain brands or items out of peer pressure.

We divided them into teams of four and let them choose an advertisement out of a collection that we had found in magazines. We asked the students questions like: What is your initial impression of this advert? What product is being advertised? Why did the marketing team behind this ad choose this design? What type of audience are they trying to attract? Does it make you want to buy the product? Why/why not? If you were to design the next ad for this product would you stick with this theme or go for a new angle?

The three ads that the students picked to analyze: Ice breakers Sours with a girl with "weird eyebrows"; Covergirl Queen Collection with the astonishing tagline, "None of us are flawless" -Queen Latifah; and Edy's Ice Cream in Sr. and Jr. sizes

Monica led a discussion on jobs and income, and the ladies filled out some information about allowances and jobs that they could do today. She also had them discuss what it meant to “Invest in Yourself” and how level of education can affect your income potential. One of our ladies made the point, “it’s like, if you’re babysitting at 40 – you’ll be homeless basically” – we did clarify that being an au pair or nanny could actually be a lucrative career, but I think the girls had already convinced themselves otherwise.

Something I had wanted to do last year in our class was discuss a current affairs article with the students in each class. I found an article that I thought tied into our marketing discussion earlier. It was about how schools are considering selling advertising space to raise revenues. We asked them questions like why they thought schools were considering selling advertising space and if their school started doing this, would their spending decisions be influenced by the advertisements?

We finished up with a review of the class, and picked up the index cards we had left for them (to anonymously write any question that wanted to know about money). All in all it was a productive class and I can’t wait to go back now that I am familiar with the students. Unfortunately getting to stay engaged from 4pm-6pm on a Thursday evening for a topic as dry as personal finance will be tough, but with our passion, energy and fresh ideas, I can say with confidence that Christine, Monica and I are ready for the challenge.

Seminar at Operation HOPE

This past Saturday I led a money management and credit seminar for adults at Operation HOPE, Harlem. Even though I have taught the computer classes there for the last twelve months, I was a little nervous leading up to the class. My prior personal financial education teaching experiences have involved working with teenagers through High Water Women’s Financial Literacy program and the recent workshop with the READ Foundation. In those circumstances when discussing credit, the subject matter has been purely conceptual. Very few, if any at all, actually used credit cards so the workshops consisted of general advice for their future use. These adults had very real issues like high levels of credit card debt and low credit scores that were preventing a successful job search.

I did a lot of preparation for the class – and was sure to brush up on a range of topics that I was less well versed on (e.g. how declaring bankruptcy affects credit score, consumer’s rights with collection agencies and settling disputes on credit reports). I knew that most of the participants would be most interested in fixing their credit reports or improving their scores, but we began at the beginning – the psychology of spending. I felt that to understand how to improve a credit score we need to understand how credit works. To understand how credit works, we need to understand our income and expenses. To understand that, we had to begin by exploring our money values and habits. Over two and half hours we covered a lot of material!

The reason I was asked to lead this class was that the former credit and money management specialist retired and his replacement had only just been hired. The new credit and money management specialist happened to attend the class on Saturday and was so helpful for any questions that I wasn’t prepared for. For example, one question posed during the class was “Does using layaway affect your credit score”. My answer/guess was no (the item hasn’t left the store so there is no promise of repayment for a received good) and the new specialist was able to confirm that response for me. He also had some great perspective on how filing for bankruptcy can continue to haunt you even after the ten year period when it shows up on your credit report.

It was a fun class and I’m definitely looking forward to the next opportunity to lead a money management and credit class!