During the email delivery of bills, 22-year-old Amanda Jenkins rarely lets them gather dust. But it wasn’t long ago, Jenkins was in over her head.
“In college, I may tell you A rounded plus B squared equals C squared,” Jenkins said. However, I can’t advise you on how to balance a checkbook or how to budget for groceries or how to get by on a week’s worth of food.
As a student, Jenkins had a desire to spend. She blew paychecks on things she didn’t need.
“I really didn’t have a lot of financial responsibility to think about things and what I was spending my money on,” Jenkins said. “I was only having my day, I guess.”
When a financial planner visited her course at Tenor High School, all of that changed.
“She scared me straight,” recalled Jenkins. That raised a red flag for me for the day.
Jenkins quickly realized that all she wanted from life was a possibility before keeping her funds and savings in test.
“You might be able to learn how to become an adult. That’s called adulting. Paying bills is piece of adulting,” Jenkins said.
“We have people who are dealing with a lot of credit card debt. We have young people who are so burdened with student loan debt that they can’t afford to buy a home,” said Brenda Campbell, the president of the Milwaukee- based non- profit SecureFutures.
The team’s goal is to bring Financial Literacy to the school.
“It’s about having knowledge of income and expenses, banks, and using credit. It’s all you need to know about your money,” said Campbell.
State polls find the majority of Wisconsinites, 51%, cannot effectively response simple money management issues. About 3% of Wisconsin households don’t even have a savings or checking account, and roughly 2% of them live paycheck to paycheck. About a third of Wisconsin’s communities are roughly the size of Racine County.
“We have kids with no one in their community who has ever been accumulated,” added Campbell. Why would they go and start a lender if they are used to going to the check-cashing business?
Cash Coach is one of the courses offered by SecureFutures. Teenagers like Jenkins are paired with volunteer economic mentors to help them develop long-term money management practices.
Jenkins recalls some of the initial inquiries she made of them.
“How to resources, that’s perhaps the first question we asked and the first thing they tried to get us to understand,” they said.
Not long after that, Jenkins was able to deposit $1, 000 into her savings account for the first time. Nowadays people are asking her about money.
“Some of my friends, they don’t have any credit at all and they want me to help them with their credit”, said Jenkins. “I’m like, ‘Oh child. I got you. You require assistance from me, please? I am aware of how to raise your credit score.
Campbell shared her two cents with FOX6 News regarding how everyone can make adjustments for a brighter financial coming:
- For one quarter, track all of your bills. What can you survive without and what do you want?
- What can you survive without and what do you want?
- Find out your extended- term savings goals. How much money will you need to buy a home or leave in 10 or 20 times? What’s your schedule to achieve those goals?
- How much money will you need to retire or buy a home in 10 or 20 years? What’s your schedule to achieve those goals?
“You can sometimes make more money – does that mean another work, Uber– whatever it means for you,” Campbell advised, “Or, you can invest less”.
Jenkins claimed she is on record to be debt-free when she graduates from UW-Midlin. Because she switched from saving to spending, the life she generally wanted is now in her hands.
Because I worked so hard on my credit, I’m about to buy a brand-new vehicles, Jenkins said.
Next quarter, FOX6 Cents heads to the school: how Milwaukee Public Schools are getting children excited – and hands on – with financial planning.