Posted by: Kathy Griffin
on Sep 25, 2009
I attended yesterday's public meeting of the Financial Literacy and Education Commission (FLEC), which announced a significant and sensible change to the national strategy for financial literacy that has been in effect since 2006. This new strategy includes a review of existing federal financial literacy programs, not merely to catalog them, but to identify the ones that work.
Halleluiah!
The new strategy is a step in the right direction, yet time's a-wasting! This is particularly the case for young adults about to graduate with all that student loan debt!
Tim Ranzetta of Student Lending Analytics lays out components of the successful financial literacy strategy implemented in New Zealand and a critique of the FLEC's process and progress, or lack thereof, so far. New Zealand's strategy is proof that dramatic and measurable progress can be made in a few years. Diana Crossan, New Zealand Retirement Commissioner, and presenter at the FLEC meeting, insists their success is due in large part to broad embrace of public, private, for-profit, and non-profit participants.
This is such a critical issue; and the problem is so enormous. If we are truly looking for things that work, why wouldn’t we open up our search beyond the federal domain? There's plenty of room for many approaches, targeting different demographics, targeting different financial topics and skills, targeting different life-stages, etc. I think we’d all agree that sinking more time, money and energy into programs that don't work, no matter how good they make us feel, is something we can ill afford.
Let’s identify all of the programs that work, government, for profit and non profit, and employ them to solve this urgent problem now!
Posted by: Kathy Griffin
on Sep 22, 2009
We have a national crisis in financial literacy, particularly among young adults. I believe this is a crisis we as a nation can no longer wait to address. As many of you also know from firsthand experience, MoneyU is a start to solving this crisis. To date, thousands of young adults have benefited from MoneyU’s engaging and effective approach to delivering personal financial education. While I am pleased to have had that many students take MoneyU, it's far too few to make even a small dent in the crisis. We must do more, and more we shall . . .
A few weeks ago we made a decision to offer MoneyU virtually free to high school seniors and college freshmen, through their schools until June 1, 2010. We would like to be in a position to make it truly free, but as you know there are real costs to develop and deliver this kind of education. As a small business we can’t afford to bear all of those costs. As a result we will be charging schools a fee of $4.00/learner to help defray those costs. Schools may begin buying blocks of logins today.
If this virtually free offer is as successful as we hope it will be, there is a possibility that we will recoup more than our costs. If that happens we intends to distribute 50 percent of any additional funds to two not-for-profit organizations that focus on delivering financial literacy programs to hard-to-reach and underserved populations. The names of the two organizations will be selected from a list of 10 and will be announced in mid-October. The other ½ will be used to further develop and enhance MoneyU so that it continues to be a relevant and useful resource for young adults.
We are doing one more thing to make access to MoneyU as affordable to as many young adults as possible. For students whose schools don’t participate in the Virtually Free offer, we will offer MoneyU at 70% off the current individual login cost of $49.95. That means that anyone will be able to go to www.MoneyU.com and buy a login for $14.95.
I hope you share my excitement about these developments. If you do, please spread the word to your colleagues and friends and encourage them to take advantage of this offer by visiting our revolutionary new financial literacy game website. In order to keep our costs down we are using PR and word-of-mouth as our primary means to get the word about this offer out and your help would be much appreciated.
