I was directed toward the George Washington University Credit Union Initiative, a group of GW students working to charter a completely student-run credit union for the university community. All 20 members of the team are full-time students who run the project as volunteers in addition to attending classes, applying for internships, and enjoying the college social experience.

The students who run the initiative hope to not only offer the benefits of a traditional credit union — higher interest rates on savings, lower rates on loans, and member ownership of the institution — but they also plan to provide services tailored to the unique needs of college students, such as internship loans and financial literacy programs.

The internship loan stood out to me because money is oftentimes a large obstacle for students searching for internship opportunities. Many internships are unpaid, which presents a hurdle for students who lack the resources to take on unpaid work, yet still need the experience that comes from interning. Small loans to help cover expenses during an internship, explains Julian Daszkal, GWCUI’s CEO, can help students not only accept amazing summer opportunities, but also build a credit score which will help them as they seek larger loans in the future.

“When students come in, they don’t really have a credit score; they’re either no-file or thin-file borrowers,” he says. “So when they go out to get their first job and they start to take on, say, an auto loan, or they want to buy a house in the future, they need to have a good credit score. Being able to start that early is really important.”

The project is also focused on helping ensure GW students graduate with a solid base of financial literacy. While many students take classes on economics and personal finance, Daszkal told me those lessons don’t always translate to personal finance.

“What you learn academically isn’t necessarily the same thing that you’ll learn when you go and in the real world apply for a loan,” he says, noting a lack of understanding around how credit scores affect interest rates on loans, or the nuances of having personal guarantors or cosigners on a loan. “There are a lot of small things that I think are very important that you don’t learn in the classroom, that are necessary to learn at a young age that I think that a credit union on campus would be able to really create a difference.”

That felt familiar. Economics is one of the most popular majors at Williams, and many of my peer have internships and jobs in banking already lined up for after graduation. Despite this interest in financial institutions, however, I recognize a lack of understanding of basic financial skills and concepts. When I tell my peers I work in the credit union industry, they often ask me what that means.

My conversation with GWCUI leaders illuminated how college campuses can be a perfect environment for credit unions, and how much students and the school can benefit from the collaboration and community that comes from local financial institutions. Aside from the growth opportunities credit unions can find on campuses, if students finish college more financially literate and empowered, they are likely to look back on their college experience more positively and generously, and be more likely to give back to the community that nurtured them as young adults.

Not only can that involvement create interpersonal relationships that help ingrain students in a community, explains Umar Madhi, GWCUI’s chief technology officer, since the students are also the employees, “when you’re volunteering on behalf of your community, there’s a lot greater incentive to help the people that are in your position.”

I am convinced this initiative is a great opportunity to educate students and recruit for the future of the industry. George Washington seems like the perfect place to test this, with a large, diverse student body located in the heart of the nation’s capital and the advantage of having a similar success story nearby — the Georgetown University Alumni and Student Credit Union, which has been entirely student-run for over 30 years.

I am curious to see if this model could be applied to other colleges around the country like mine, with fewer than 2,500 students and located 40 miles from the closest city. Hundreds of credit unions serve universities in some manner, either because they were chartered to do so or as an on-campus financial institution. And many more still have a presence in college towns or near major universities. Deepening those partnerships could not only help expose more students to the industry, but also provide first-hand experience with real-life financial concepts, as well as the workings of a financial cooperative.

I know that on whatever college campus you look at there are students who would benefit from the credit union model and the professional development that comes with working in a legitimate financial institution and serving your peers.

The post Credit Unions On Campus appeared first on CreditUnions.com.

We use platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter, but one personal finance service has also become a form of digital socializing.

Among my friends, the most popular mobile payment service is Venmo. Founded in 2009 and acquired by PayPal in 2012, it has been a part of the fintech industry for over a decade. Currently only available in the United States, it serves as a way for people to split costs without dealing with cash by connecting users’ debit cards to their Venmo account and easily making payments to other Venmo users.

The Social Media-fication Of Venmo

However, Venmo’s brand messaging not only positions it as a financial transaction option, but a social app, as well. “With Venmo, settling up feels like catching up”, the company’s website reads. “Send and receive money with Venmo friends and express yourself in each payment note”.

The social nature of the service is also evident in the app’s design, which allows users to personalize their profile, add friends, and send personalized messages along with their payments. The app also has a feed, much like Twitter, where users can see who their friends are paying, along with any the message they send with that payment. Users can even “like” and comment on their friends payments.

Even though the app includes the option to make payments private, my friends and I are constantly making public payments and checking out each others’ activity on the app, just as we follow each other on other social outlets. Subsequently, as my personal finance has become interconnected with my social identity, the money I share and receive in my Venmo account has become very different from the cash that I keep in my credit union account.

Although those two accounts are connected and I can easily transfer money from one to the other, I rarely do. Money in my Venmo is just passed back and forth between the same group of friends; one day I pay for their coffee, and the next they pay for a movie ticket. My friends and I sometimes joke that it feels like another form of currency because it never leaves the app and enters our accounts.

Because technology is so closely associated with socializing for many members of Gen Z, it will be interesting to see how these kinds of transactions shape the way we view personal finance in the future. Will we be more likely to borrow or lend because of all the money sitting on digital platforms? How will our spending habits change as Venmo makes it easier to do more than just P2P payments within the app?

Millions of consumers use Venmo, but many credit unions also offer their own P2P payment services, often through their mobile banking apps. While not all credit unions have the resources to offer those services, those that can may want to take a page from Venmo and attempt to replicate some of its capabilities. Since many members of my generation let their money sit in Venmo rather than moving it back into their daily banking account, credit unions and other financial institutions are losing the opportunity to understand those spending patterns and banking behaviors. Just like cash, once it’s out of the account, the credit union loses any understanding of how that money is used. Capitalizing on that knowledge could lead to a deeper knowledge of how Gen Z interacts with money.

The post Hello, Venmo (Goodbye, Checking Account) appeared first on CreditUnions.com.

In this case, the lawn is where the millennials and before them, Gen Xers, in my life and career grew up under my watchful, anxious eyes as a parent and as a colleague and mentor (but only when asked) in the past few decades.

The tweet was a lame attempt to poke at millennials spending habits and went like this: You: why is my balance so low. Bank account: make coffee at home. Bank account: eat the food thats already in the fridge. Bank account: you dont need a cab, its only three blocks. You: I guess well never know. Bank account: seriously?

Chase’s original tweet caught swift Internet blacklash.

American Banker provided this reporting on the backlash from the tweet, which the big bank soon replaced with something more banal. A lot of the comments were around big bank bailouts, etc., but my reaction is more visceral: Wow, what a stupid tweet.

Besides being incredibly tone deaf about many peoples income and circumstances, it’s a gross generalization about millennials. As a boomer parent of that generation, Im so tired of hearing that.

Besides the fallacy of attributing set characteristics to an entire class of people defined by something as arbitrary as age, its prejudiced stereotyping, and for professional communicators, intellectually lazy.

Indulge me a brag. My daughters a millennial, got her PhD at 28 and her license to practice clinical psychology at 29, without a dime of student debt and little help from her parents beyond a used car when she graduated from high school.

Her husband is an Army veteran and six-year cop who undergoes rigorous training all the time and risks his life daily. I work with a bunch of super-bright, hard-working 20-somethings and know a bunch more.

Most are doing fine, and making the most of their opportunities, but even they face a much tougher work and lifestyle/income environment than I did at their age. Most millennials do (as I fall into a generalization Im comfortable making here).

Theres all this talk now about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. There hardly aint any boots anymore, especially not for people who cant afford college or other training needed for careers that can support a lifestyle we would call middle class or the American Dream. Life just costs more.

When I was a kid Id argue things were actually much easier. I graduated from high school in 1974, the son of schoolteacher parents who put three children through state universities without incurring any debt of which Im aware. My tuition at Kent State University, if memory serves, was about $280 a quarter and like many of my classmates, I had a scholarship that defrayed some of that.

I recognize that I was blessed to not have to work my way through school. I did work, but at internships and weekly newspapers and things relevant to my looming career.

I didnt have to pay my own tuition or rent. Students who did? Typically, they could actually make enough money from the jobs available to them to either pay their whole way or come pretty close to it.

Just try going to college now on a part-time job like that, without incurring a ton of debt that youll carry for years to come. And then establish yourself after school. My first job out of school paid a resounding $150 a week, but that was one months rent.

I lived in small-town Ohio, and I know things were cheaper then, but real wages have not even come close to keeping up with living expenses for far too many working people, regardless of collar color. I live in Columbia, SC, now, where a one-bedroom apartment averages $870 a month and the average minimum-wage worker would have to put in 80 or so hours a week to afford it.

But enough about me. Back to that bank tweet. Presumably an operation like JPMorgan Chase is able to hire the savviest, most plugged-in social media experts out there and equip them with the best of research and communication tools.

How can they be so tone deaf? Im not sure what the lesson here is for credit unions, except to think hard about your audience, get to know them personally, don’t assume you know what’s best for them because you know their age, and then think twice before you hit send.

Not down for that? Then maybe it’s time to get off our lawn.

The post Get Off Our Lawn! How A Big Bank’s Cliché Sparked A Tweet Storm. appeared first on CreditUnions.com.

Last week, I was eating at a DC-area pizza chain, &Pizza, when I saw it: A sign on the napkin dispenser that says We Text Back with a local phone number.

It doesn’t say With questions or concerns call or text It simply says, We text back.

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Just because the napkin dispenser says it doesn’t make it true.

Having worked in marketing as well as communications, I was curious. So, I texted the number. I expected an automated message from the corporate headquarters saying something along the lines of Thank you for reaching out, blah blah blah. Instead, I saw how &Pizza is engaging customers through a designated hotline to which customers can text for any reason. I was surprised to get a text back quickly from an actual person with a sense of humor. The well-crafted responses were, dare I say, saucy. (See screenshot of conversation below).

&Pizza really does text back.

My honest intentions with texting &Pizza were two-fold:

• Confirm &Pizza would truly text back.
• Figure out if there was a catch.

Our conversation was short and friendly with no strings attached. But this simple action and conversation with an &Pizza employee got me thinking: What does this mean for the marketing and digital worlds? Why don’t more companies do this?

There are many companies who are still reluctant to engage with clients or customers online whether that be through social media or online reviews, let alone via text (my preferred form of communication) but why? The idea of texting customer service is brilliant given that many young adults use their phones for banking, social media, and general communications anyway.

According to BrightLocal, 97% of consumers looked online for local businesses in 2017, and 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. A more granular stat shows that 32% of consumers read local reviews on mobile apps in 2017 a growth of 14 percentage points from 2016.

This is where Pizza’s texting strategy hits its target consumers who are on their phones and looking for recommendations for places to go. When they have questions, comments, or concerns, where are they likely to turn? The device already in their hand. The businesses that are hesitant to take control of their mobile and online presence are missing a major opportunity to engage and falling behind companies like Pizza.

This excursion offered my ideal customer experience in 2018. I was able to get a great pizza and have a friendly conversation via text with a brand representative. With that being said, if I ever have any issues with my &Pizza experience which I won’t because I’m a millennial and we don’t complain to customer service I’ll know exactly where to go.

The post How My Local Pizza Place Is Taking Customer Engagement To The Next Level appeared first on CreditUnions.com.

My Generation occasionally turns the lens on the individual people who power Callahan, its employees, to discover how they bank online, buy houses, volunteer, hold two jobs, figure out finances, and more.

This summer, though, Callahan polled 23 current and former employees of all ages to learn more about their attitudes toward cash. Do the millennials and Gen Zs carry cash? Do they know what cash looks like? Do our Gen Xs and Boomers live at the ATM? Do they know that Venmo is a verb now?

The results here, split into groups for employees 22-32 years old and 33-61 years old, explore a range of topics, from cash usage and payment preference to mobile wallets and security concerns. Readers are cautioned against extrapolating these results to all people in a given age range. This survey was created to learn more about Callahan’s employees. To learn more about members’ wants, needs, and habits, credit unions must ask them. In that regard, let this survey serve to guide your questioning.

*If an age group is missing, it’s because no respondents reported using the service described.

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The post What’s In Our Wallet? appeared first on CreditUnions.com.

I had always known about credit unions my mom has been a member of hers since before I was born but I began to truly understand what makes them different when I witnessed their recovery efforts after the economic catastrophe of the late aughts. For that, I will forever be loyal to my credit union.

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That being said, I have a hard time convincing my friends to leave their big banks, or even consider a credit union for a car loan or mortgage loan, for several reasons:

• Public perception: People my age don’t know what credit unions are. I’ve heard them labeled as everything from low-budget alternatives to one step up from loan sharks. None of this is true, so how can credit unions communicate their story in a way that makes a lasting, positive impact? I suggest looking at the digital marketing and outreach tactics used by startup financial companies on Instagram and other media outlets. Start stealing those slick color schemes, to-the-point marketing language, and other ideas from them because they’re stealing my generation away from you.
• Charity & Giving: I’ve recently been served ads for a private company that consolidates student loans and gives some of it to charity. C’mon, a credit union does the same thing but at a local and, in my opinion, better level. I see firsthand the impact my credit union has on my community, regardless of membership status, and it makes me proud to be a member. This is a considerable benefit that is built into the credit union model. It just needs to be fine-tuned to reach this generation.
• ATMs: Some of the most frequent pushback I get is about ATM availability and fees. I admit, this is the toughest argument to win because I do have to pay fees when I can’t find a nearby, in-network ATM. My best advice for credit unions is to figure out a way to decrease fees or eliminate them when possible and communicate what benefits you offer that mitigate the pinch. Big banks aren’t offering better options, my friends just tend to forgive banks for their failures much more than credit unions.
• Free checking: I hear so many of my friends complain about this, and I simply do not understand why they would pay a fee for banking. This is especially relevant in underserved areas where those fees can add up and impact a family’s budget.

As an elder millennial, my No. 1 suggestion for credit unions is to heavily promote what makes you relevant today and use the advantages baked into the cooperative model to reach young consumers.

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I don’t know anyone regardless of political belief or socioeconomic background that doesn’t want to bank better. I genuinely believe credit unions are the smarter choice for anyone, and it’s time for the industry to start banking on that.

Brianne Aiken is a healthcare and policy communications strategist living in New York City. She previously worked for Callahan & Associates and the Brookings Institution and is currently communications director at Columbia University Medical Center.

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The post How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Co-Op appeared first on CreditUnions.com.

My bank charged me $35 for having negative $2 to my name. I was exhausted and broke, so I did what any self-respecting teen would do: I went online. I found Simple Bank a fee-less, punishment-less, technology-driven checking experience. Signing up is as easy as creating a username and password, providing a picture of your ID, and then waiting for your debit card to come in the mail. From beginning to end, the process takes about a week.

Fast forward two years, and I’m still here, loving my bank. ContentMiddleAd

What Is Simple?

Simple is based out of Portland, OR, and its accounts are operated in partnership with BBVA Compass. Because it has no fees, Simple earns its money by collecting interest on customer deposits. This interest margin is split among its partner banks.

Naturally, I came across other online banks, but none quite like Simple.

Namely, I was compelled by Simple’s technology and convenience. My banking needs aren’t complex. I need a way to spend and a way to save. Simple lets me automate my bill payments and helps me diligently save for them by withdrawing automatically from my Safe-to-Spend account. It lets me track my spending so I can easily see how much I spend eating out for lunch although the engineers at Simple haven’t made my answer any less shameful, unfortunately.

More than reliable, functional technology, though, I don’t want to be penalized for not having much money sometimes.

I’m currently an intern at Callahan & Associates. I’m entering my senior year at American University, so in a year’s time, I’ll need to stretch Simple as far as I can to make student loan payments. Luckily, Simple can help with its Goals feature.

Why I Bank Online

Therapists and finance experts alike will tell you that goal setting is an important part of success in all its varied forms. Simple’s technology helped me set and meet goals time and time again.

Goal setting is critical for me, and according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Digital Banking Consumer Survey, I’m not the only one. People setting goals to save for an array of purposes would surely benefit from a tool like Simple’s. And according to the survey, saving is what consumers most want help with from their financial institution. This is true across all age groups. Millennials, Gen-Xers, and Boomers all agreed that saving for retirement was their top priority.

Simple’s interface makes saving money easy and easy to understand.

The Goals feature is a powerful way to save and is why I still use Simple. I say how much money I need and when I need it, and the app does the rest.

Simple automatically moves money from my Safe-to-Spend account on a timeline I set. If I want $30 by the end of the month, I can set the app to set aside $1 every day until I’ve met that. Or set aside $15 from each of my bimonthly paychecks. Or $2 a day for 15 days. If I had a retirement account and wanted to move a certain amount of money into it every month, Simple would take care of that for me.

If my saving plan is pinching a bit too hard, I simply hit pause and start again when I’m ready.

The point is that it’s my spending, my saving, my way all at my fingertips. Such an easy tool empowers me to take control of my finances.

For people just starting down the road of personal finance, this kind of confidence can be impactful for retention. A clean, minimalist interface makes every transaction effortless. A quick browse through an app store proves many of the mobile apps from community banks and credit unions are hardly that. And no wonder apps are expensive to develop.

For now, I’ll keep using Simple. But my banking needs will soon change. They won’t be so basic. Will Simple suit me then?

Why I’ll Stop Banking Online

I’m 21, but if my understanding of time is correct, I won’t always be. I’ll soon be considering things like mortgages, retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, and more.

These services are quite easy to get online (see Robinhood or LendingTree as examples). Ideally, though, I’d like to keep everything under one roof.

I’d love for all my accounts to be as accessible and easy as my checking account with Simple, but is that smart? Can online banks like Simple sustain being full-service providers? What will their rates look like? Will an app explain a complex product as well as an industry professional can in person? Will the law or financial institutions even allow for the full migration of banking to the internet?

Simplifying complicated financial products to provide a streamlined online experience raises some serious consumer protection questions about information sharing. Maybe staying fully online won’t be so easy after all.

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According to PwC, the complexity of some people’s banking needs means branches are here to stay, although at least one credit union runs a variation on a branchless model. Data supports this. In that PwC survey, 59% of respondents apply for new loans in person, and 37% prefer using branches for any sort of financial advice. In fact, credit unions added 100 new branches between December and March, and nearly 2,000 over the past five years.

It turns out that there’s a sizeable amount of people, including myself, who think the internet isn’t the best place for all things finance yet.

The post Why I Only Bank Online appeared first on CreditUnions.com.

In the past, ghosting was relegated to the domain of personal and romantic relationships. With the rise of social media and dating apps, it’s never been easier to retain anonymity while simultaneously behaving poorly with little social repercussion. According to recent estimates, some 50% of men and women have experienced ghosting.

Increasingly, however, ghosting is haunting the workplace. But why?

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Unemployment, for starters. The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 3.8% in May 2018. That’s the lowest it’s been since April 2000, which was also the last year, before 2018, that unemployment rates were below 4% for consecutive months. More open jobs exist today than there are unemployed workers. This is the first time that’s happened since the Labor Department began keeping record in 2000.

10-Year U.S. Unemployment Rate

DATA AS OF MAY 2018

Bureau of Labor Statistics

Piggybacking on unemployment, U.S. companies are facing a historic labor shortage. The rate of professionals quitting their jobs hit a record level in March, and among those who quit, two-thirds do so voluntarily. Companies have become so desperate for bodies that corporate America is recruiting teenagers (so much for flipping burgers) and cities with unfilled jobs are offering cash, student-debt relief, and home purchase assistance to lure potential employees.

In short, employees today have more leverage to get what they want and no shortage of opportunities to change employers.

With this newfound power, employers are setting job interviews with candidates who never show up. And, worse, some prospective employees accept positions and never show up for their first day.

That puts employers in a bad spot. However, it’s not an unfamiliar predicament. Job seekers from the past decade have plenty of storiesof interviewing at a company and never hearing from them again.

Today’s ghosting employees are just flipping the script. They’re saying no in a way that society and employers have reinforced and desensitized by saying nothing at all.

People who ghost are primarily focused on avoiding their own emotional discomfort, according to Psychology Today, not how it makes another person whether a date or hiring manager feel. Ghosting as a behavior might be unavoidable, but employers do have a few ways to reduce the chances it happens to them. Some are offering more competitive and creative employee packages things like working 30 hours and getting paid for 40 or free employee cell phones to entice employees to make that commitment.

As unprofessional as ghosting is, the behavior exemplifies a larger truth in the recruiting and hiring processes: The balance of power has begun to shift. Qualified applicants are, for the first time in nearly a generation, able to yield the most powerful word in negotiation: No.

In today’s competitive employee market, the onus has fallen to the employer to get the applicant to say, yes.

Or, at least, to say anything.

The post Say Anything: Why Prospective Employees Are Ghosting Prospective Employers appeared first on CreditUnions.com.

In its 2018 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends Report, NAR states that millennials who comprise the largest share of current home buyers are increasingly purchasing detached, single-family homes in suburban areas.

Wait, millennials are buying single-family homes in the suburbs?

What happened my generation? I thought we all agreed to rent overpriced, undersized apartments forever? I thought we agreed that equity was overrated?

To track down some answers I interviewed two Callahan millennials who are thinking about buying their first home and one who already has. I asked them about renting versus owning, savings goals, and the emotional attachment that comes with homeownership.

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Have you always wanted to own a house?

Sam Taft, Associate Vice President, Analytics & Business Development: Yes, definitely. But especially because my wife and I have a dog now.

Jen Davis, Vice President, Information Systems & Technology: No. I grew up in Manhattan. I’ve lived in apartments all my life except for when I lived in a house for one year in college. I don’t care. I just need to live somewhere. I’d live in a shanty in a good school district.

Jamie Maurer, Advisor, Leadership Team Development: No. And I’m still not 100% sure that I do want to buy a home in the DC market.

What’s your take on renting versus owning? Why did you buy or are considering buying?

ST: We were sick of living in small spaces that we couldn’t control. Being newly married, we’re looking at the next steps for three, five, seven years down the line. Being people who work with numbers and dollars, too, when we ran the math on the cash-burn renting versus owning, it was pretty convincing.

JD: Our place right now is perfect. It’s an eight-minute walk to work for my husband and a 10-minute walk to our son’s day care. It’s just easy. I love our building. If it had three rooms and it made sense to burn equity for the rest of my life, I would stay there forever. But we’re just losing money.

JM: I’m willing to spend more to rent and have flexibility. DC is a transient location, so if I bought a home and we were relocated or had to leave, worst-case scenario I could always treat it as an investment property for government contractors or college kids moving into town. However, in this market, what and where I can afford would be too far away from where the renters are. We’re walking down a long, warn path of should we pull the trigger? Should we not?

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Do you have an emotional connection to homeownership? What is it?

ST: Yes. Owning the house isn’t just about the investment to me. It’s more about owning where I live and being a part of a community.

JD: My husband grew up in a house. I didn’t. His whole mindset is: Why wouldn’t you want to live in a house? That’s what you do. Owning a house means something.’ But I don’t think it does. I think it’s just another thing.

JM: I’ve been fine without owning, but I’m starting to think about homeownership, about real estate, as an asset to pass on.

How are you positioning (or did you position) yourself financially to buy?

ST: We’d been talking about it for probably a year-and-a-half. When we had that first conversation, we were not in a position financially. After we got married last August, we asked What’s next?’ To buy a house, we had to figure out a budget and determine how much we needed to save to get to that 10% or 20% down payment. I ran a model that basically said at Month X we’re going to be at 10%, at Month Y we’re going to be at 12%, etc., so we could figure out when we were going to be able to buy.

JD: It’s the biggest purchase I’m ever going to make, and the thought of using so much of our savings as a down payment is scary. But that’s the cost of entry in this market. Moving to a cheaper location would mean a lower salary for me and my husband. And we would be dedicating the same percentage of our take-home pay to the mortgage. I’ve done the math on what we spend annually renting and what we would spend annually owning, and with 20% down, it would be about net-net. Our monthly costs will go up, even with deductions and benefits. I’m going to be sweating bullets when we do it, but it’s the right thing to do for my family.

JM: Initially, I thought nothing had to change. Working in a sales role, I’m used to living off the minimum and then saving the bigger payouts or putting them toward student loans. So, I’ve always had a little saved for discretionary purposes. It’s how I spent for my wedding. It’s where we’ll pull for the down payment. I wish I had saved more prior. There’s more expenses that go with home buying than are calculated in the monthly cost.

Have you changed your spending or savings habits to prepare for homeownership?

ST: Definitely. We cut out random expenditures dinners out, certain things at the grocery store. We were in a position where we didn’t have to tighten the belt too much, we just had to divert spending from certain areas to saving.

JD: No, I’ve always been a saver. From my first job at 16, I’ve basically saved everything. I just don’t spend money. My biggest comfort is savings. I know that to sleep well at night, I need to feel secure. I need to know that no matter what happens I can support myself and my family for a long time. There’s nothing I want more than that security.

JM: I’m not just saving money I’m hunting and gathering to make it happen. I pay close to $3,000 each month in student loans. I had been so focused on that, I couldn’t think about saving for a house.

What are/were your expectations for a house and neighborhood?

ST: My perception of the market was different when we started looking online than it was when we started visiting houses. Dramatically different. You look online and all you see is a picture of a house. And this might sound obvious, but you have no idea what that street feels like. We thought we were finding good neighborhoods that had good opportunity from a price point, and we visited and thought it’s just wasn’t somewhere we wanted to live.

JD: I want to be in a good school district. The house needs a yard and somewhere to park, but that’s it. We’ve looked at houses and they’re all fine. Are they worth the money for the neighborhood? No. But I’m paying for the school district.

JM: The issue that pops up when we are looking for a home is that band isn’t drawn to anything that’s already done. He’s always drawn to things that are a work in progress. He doesn’t do construction, so he’s out of his mind if he thinks we’re going to undertake a reno.

The post The Mind Of A First-Time Homebuyer appeared first on CreditUnions.com.

I volunteered this Spring with Junior Achievement of Greater Washington, a financial literacy organization that works to bridge what students learn in the classroom with what they learn in their lives. According to the group’s website: We can make learning relevant to every student’s future by infusing authenticity, business connectivity, and real role models into the everyday learning experience.

Specifically, I spent time with the JA Finance Park, a program that uses a classroom-style 14-lesson curriculum to teach financial literacy to middle school students. The curriculum is split into four sections: income; savings and investment; debit and credit; and budgeting. Once students complete the program, they put their classroom knowledge to the test in an interactive environment called the park. I volunteered for this interactive portion by heading my own small class of students, helping them navigate through the park and offering financial advice.

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No Walk Through The Park

When students visit the park, they are randomly assigned different profiles. For example, a student might have to build a budget for a high school teacher that earns a salary of $35,000 a year, who has $20,000 in debt, and has a 2-year-old son.

Students start their journey in the park by taking out taxes from their salary and calculating their net monthly income. On the day I volunteered, many were shocked to discover how little they had left to spend after taxes.

Next, students allocate money into different savings buckets retirement, emergency savings, and other savings. Instructors recommend students save at least 10% of their monthly income, and the students were even more shocked to see the effect that additional decrease had on their spending money.

Students must conduct research before building their budget, which means exploring the park to learn more about life’s expenses. Then, they budget for their expenses based on their monthly household income and their character’s profile, which includes details like number of children, spouse support, career, debt, and more.

The students I worked with started the simulation thinking shopping would be the most fun part of the day. However, they quickly realized it was the most stressful. If they prioritized items like furniture or clothing, they found that they had little to no money left to pay for a house or a car.

The Role Of Volunteers And Credit Unions

3 Things I Learned

• Children do not exactly know the difference between a credit union and a bank but were infatuated with increasing their savings accounts and having debit cards. These are two avenues credit unions can use to increase membership in younger members.
• Teaching financial literacy in schools inspires students to work even harder to reach their dreams. Some students were upset to have profiles that didn’t earn as much monthly income as their neighbor’s, which spurred conversation about their dream occupations, and how they could work to get there.
• Budgeting. Is. Hard. I followed my students through the simulation and realized that I also would have had a tough time in their shoes at certain points throughout the day. The simulation gave each student an entire family to consider and having to think about others at such a young age is hard. I was surprised to see how thoughtful each student was when budgeting for their simulated future.

Volunteers at JA Finance Park offer instruction throughout the day and advise students on their finances. Because of their preliminary lessons, the students know a lot about savings and budgeting, but they still have a lot of questions. For example, I saw that students were surprised when they had to budget for babysitting or for a spouse’s transportation costs and found it difficult to give up luxury items like concert tickets or a king-sized bed in exchange for healthcare and groceries.

My class was stationed at the Apple Federal Credit Union ($2.5B, Fairfax, VA) booth, which provided an information stop about mortgages and retirement savings. Besides helping my own class with their finance simulation, I offered insights on credit unions, credit scores, retirement savings and mortgage loans to other students passing by our booth.

Credit unions can help inspire financial responsibility in their communities by sending volunteers to programs like JA Finance Park and creating similar programs on their own. BECU holds three or more annual financial literacy fairs for local high schools. Read more about those here. Earlier this year, Callahan contributor Sharon Simpson wrote about how she accidently raised money-smart teens and how credit unions can support parents in doing the same. Read that here. Over the holidays last year, CreditUnions.com profiled two credit unions that use themed communications to keep members on the right spending track. Read that piece here. And last year, CreditUnions.com celebrated Financial Literacy Month that’s April, by the way with a roundup of inspiring stories from credit union land. Read that here. We did the same for 2018 read that one here.

Many credit unions, like First Financial Credit Union ($519.7M, Albuquerque, NM), link parents and children to the Kirby Kangaroo Club, an online program that encourages children to play games and learn about finances. Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union ($5.1B, Harrisburg, PA) offers suggestions on finance-themed board games that parents and children can play together. This is a wonderful way to show children what credit unions are all about and potentially grow future members.

As of September 2017, 22.4% of credit unions reported offering Financial Literacy workshops, and 37.5% offered some type of financial education program to members. Unfortunately, these fields are no longer available on the 5300 Call Report, but they have been increasing for years. I hope the trend continues even if we can’t track it.

There are JA Finance Park locations across the country. If you want to get involved, start by visiting myja.org/volunteers/signup and registering to volunteer. If your credit union conducts its own financial literacy parks or offers another kind of financial literacy program, please tell me and the readers of CreditUnons.com about it in the comments below.

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