April is Financial Literacy Month. This small ebook is crammed with easy to execute tips from savvy individuals. Worth storing on your computer screen. Tips for Financial Literacy
Tips from the Financially Savvy
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Category Archives: Financial Literacy
Asian Women Go to the Library to Get Out of Poverty
Women make up 24 percent of the workforce in South Asia, according to the Wall Street Journal. That represents a huge untapped resource: 336 million women like Chuna could be contributing to their families’ incomes and lifting themselves out of poverty if they had the skills to do so.
Chuna is part of a solution to inequity and poverty that is taking root in some of South Asia’s most remote corners, and it begins with a simple but disruptive idea: going to the library.
For more than 2 million rural villagers across South Asia, libraries called Read Centers have already become a powerful platform for women like Chuna to learn skills, network in her community, and become leaders who change social norms.
At the age of 47, Chuna changed her and her daughters’ lives by learning to read and starting a women’s group. Today, her goal is to convince other women that it’s never too late to learn, earn an income, and change your community.
Women play a vital role in poor households. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said recently, “Empowering rural women is crucial for ending hunger and poverty. By denying women rights and opportunities, we deny their children and societies a better future.”
A recent UN study shows that if women were given the same access to productive resources as men, it would reduce the number of hungry people in the world by about 12 to 17 percent. Similarly, USAID stated that women are more likely than men to reinvest in their families’ food security, health, and education. Despite the obvious benefits, the road to entrepreneurship is extremely difficult for many women. They often lack the education and skills needed, and face gender discrimination. About 493 million women are illiterate worldwide. More than half of them live in South Asia.
These women rarely have the opportunity to learn at a young age. 130 million girls in South Asia will be married as chidlren by 2030, ending their education and resulting in early pregnancies. As adults, these women often must seek permission from their husbands to leave their homes for reasons other than child care or agricultural work.
In South Asia, libraries are seen as legitimate, neutral places for women to visit because they often offer child care and health services that benefit the family. The READ Centers set up by the non-profit READ Global also help women learn income-producing activities, such as sewing, beekeeping, or mushroom farming.
When women learn a trade and start providing income to their families, their husbands often gain trust in the READ Center and give them more freedom. Women can become networked with a community of other women who provide mutual, ongoing support.
Literacy does not necessarily precede economic empowerment. But READ Global has found that these skill sets are mutually reinforcing, and together, they can empower women to change the status quo in their villages.
Just last year, more than 1,700 women like Chuna learned to read through READ Centers in Nepal. Many of them also joined savings cooperatives, often putting away money for the first time in their lives. With 3,339 peers, the women collectively saved $207,382 last year at READ Centers.
And many finally became entrepreneurs: 324 moved from subsistence farming to commercial farming – earning an income from agriculture for the first time. 174 women farmers actually became self-sufficient in their production for the first time, and almost 100 women launched new businesses.
With this new income, the women helped generate almost $140,000 to invest back into the READ Centers and sustain them.
A major challenge in rural development is that efforts often don’t take a holistic approach. Many organizations and government bodies work in a piecemeal fashion: They provide one-off literacy training to women in a community for a few months, for example, and then move on.
For women like Chuna, libraries like READ Centers can play the role of incubators – not just for businesses, but also for long-term social change. By working with local partners, setting up committees to manage the centers, and providing a holistic set of training programs over the course of five years, READ Global ensures that rural villagers create local support networks that can sustain themselves in the future.
After Chuna learned to read, she had the confidence to take other training in vegetable farming, women’s leadership, health, and mobile technology. She then paid it forward by convincing her friends to join a study group with her, helping them learn to read and investing in her own daughters’ education.
“I realized that all uneducated women suffer,” Chuna says, “There are a lot of illiterate women in Nepal. I want to tell them that you’re never too old to learn.”
Living Below the Line
In the US, if you’re careful, you can get a cup of morning coffee for $1.50. But for 1.2 billion people in the world, about $1.50 is all they have to spend in a day for … everything, including all their food and beverages.
The Live Below the Line project aims to help people understand extreme poverty more personally. For five days, April 28 to May 2, people are being invited to spend only $1.50 on food and drink per day and use the money saved to make donations to poverty-fighting charities.
“We want it to be a challenge people take on in the workplace, at home, at school, or in their faith community,” says Hugh Evans, the co-founder and chief executive of The Global Poverty Project, which is sponsoring Live Below the Line.
The annual event has been held since since 2010 and has already involved 50,000 participants in more than 70 countries, raising $10 million for charities around the world. Charitable partners in the United States include the Global One Foundation, Kiva, Heifer International, Opportunity International, The Hunger Project, and the World Food Program USA.
Equally important to fund-raising is the goal of getting Americans and others in wealthy countries to think and talk about extreme poverty – and how to end it.
Eliminating extreme poverty for 1.2 billion people in the next 16 years might seem like a daunting task. But Evans points to the remarkable progress that has been made in recent years: Just since he was born, extreme poverty was halved from 52 percent in 1981 to 25 percent in 2005 and, most recently, 23 percent.
“I really believe that every generation is called upon to leave a great mark on this planet,” he says. In the late 20th century Nelson Mandela endured decades in prison on his way to ending apartheid in South Africa. For 27 consecutive years in the early 19th century, British politician William Wilberforce introduced a bill in Parliament to end the slave trade: It was rejected the first 26 times.
“No one ever said that the job [of eliminating extreme poverty] was going to be easy,” Evans says. “If it were easy, we’d have already seen an end.”
While Live Below the Line might seem to be a five-day fast, Evans is sometimes amused at how people find clever ways to feed themselves. The charities associated with Live Below the Line provide models for how to defeat extreme poverty, Evans says. He sees the way forward as “the six and the three.”
Six changes need to be made: improve and expand food security, education, health care, water and sanitation, micro-finance and other job-creating programs, and empower women. The three ways to achieve these goals are through humanitarian aid, trade, and good governance within nations.
“If you have these six and three, I believe you can make a big impact on extreme poverty,” he says.
Bank of America Fined $773 Million for Credit Card Ad-Ons
Bank of America was ordered by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to refund $727 million to consumers who were deceived by the bank’s marketing of credit card payment protection programs and others who were charged for credit monitoring services they never fully authorized. This makes the bank the fifth major credit card issuer to be financially penalized for these types of credit card practices.
The CFPB issued a consent order that showed over 1.4 million consumers were deceived by the marketing of two credit card payment protection programs. These products, called “Credit Protection Plus” and “Credit Protection Deluxe,” allowed customers to request the bank cancel some credit card debt in the event of certain hardships like disability and involuntary unemployment, or certain life events such as retirement or entering college. The CFPB found that the telemarketing practices used in selling these products were misleading. This took place between 2010 and 2012.
Bank of America must provide approximately $268 million in refunds to the more than 1.4 million customers affected by these deceptive marketing practices.
In addition, Bank of America enrolled consumers in programs to monitor their credit and alert them to potentially fraudulent activity. These programs were known as “Privacy Guard,” “Privacy Source,” and “Privacy Assist.” The bank began charging customers fees and interest without or before they received proper authorization from consumers.
Bank of America must pay $459 million to roughly 1.9 million customer accounts, representing approximately 1.5 million consumers who enrolled in the credit monitoring products and were charged while the bank did not perform all of the promised services.
“We have consistently warned companies about illegal practices related to credit card add-on products,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray. “Bank of America both deceived consumers and unfairly billed consumers for services not performed. We will not tolerate such practices and will continue to be vigilant in our pursuit of companies who wrong consumers in this market.”
Federal regulators have been cracking down on deceptive credit card practices and marketing from many of the biggest card issuers in the United States in recent years.
JP Morgan Chase, Discover, Capital One and American Express have also been recently fined for deceptive ad-ons.
Sallie Krawcheck Gives You a Question
For April is FInancial Literacy Month, ask yourself this question, courtesy Sallie Krawcheck of about to be re-named 85 Broads:
A friend brought up the idea that we all need to ask ourselves: am I a stock or I am a bond? Am I in a profession that’s higher risk, where I could lose my job? If that’s the case then I’d better be very conservative in how I think about my savings and my investments. Or I am I bond? Where I’m confident I’m in a job I’m not going to lose. I’m not going to hit the home run but I’m probably not going to lose my job. In which case with my investments I can take on a little more risk as I think about saving for retirement. I don’t know that anybody’s asking that question but it’s worth thinking about: are you a stock or a bond?
US Jumpstart Coalition for National Literacy
Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy consists of 180 organizations and 47 affiliated state coalitions dedicated to improving the financial literacy of youth from kindergarten through college age by providing advocacy, research, standards, and educational resources. Jump$tart strives to prepare youth for lifelong successful financial decision making.
• Suggest a range of content that students should know and be able to act on • Provide guidelines for evaluating published educational materials • Help to shape lesson plans, unit and course outlines, learning activities, textbooks, and other instructional materials • Increase awareness of the need for personal finance in the nation’s schools
National Standards for Personal Financial Literacy
TIAW Global Forum Honors Melanne Verveer
At a thrilling gathering of women (and men) from the world over who are working to make the world better for women, Melanne Verveer delivered an inspired address. Verveer was chief of staff for first lady Hillary Clinton, President Obama’s choice as the first Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, and is currently Executive Director for the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security.
She pointed out that 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the World Conference on Women in Beijing in which Clinton forcefully remarked, “It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.”
Ambassador Verveer noted the progress women have made, the work that remains to be done, and the miles we must go before we sleep. The women she addressed are part of the progress, step by step, in educating women to take their independent place, in encouraging them to dare to be scientists and engineers, to always reach out so another voice can be heard.
The rustling of handwoven Indian silks and the bright geometry of Ugandan robes dressed up the meeting rooms. A neatly attired Flora Villanosa, in muted browns and tans, is Mayor of what was once the Philippines poorest town. She gave up her salary for three years and turned the town around. So many remarkable stories, or her-stories as New Zealander Amanda Ellis, an Ambassador to the UN office in Geneva called them. Thanks to Lisa Kaiser Hickey, TIAW’s President, a good time to be a working woman.
Tips to Getting Good Financial Advice
- Get a referralAsk your family, friends and colleagues if they have a financial adviser they are happy with and comfortable recommending to you. This is a great way to build trust quickly with an adviser, if they are already trusted by those close to you.
- Track RecordYou want to make sure your potential adviser has a track record of experience and success; things to look for are education, awards, industry presence, client testimonials/referrals. If an adviser is not forthcoming with this sort of information when you ask, they may not be the right one for you!
- Easy flow of conversationYour relationship with a financial adviser is not like that of an accountant, where all the numbers are considered and a tax return submitted. You need to feel comfortable with your adviser almost straight away. You need to want to share more than just the numbers. The best advice outcomes occur when your adviser understands who you are, where you have come from and where you want to go. This will enable them to provide advice you understand and are motivated to stick to.It can be a good idea to meet with a few different advisers until you find the right fit for you.
- EducationThe best way to ensure advice is right for you is to understand it. An adviser should seek to explain their advice to you in a way you can understand. You don’t need to know all the ins and outs, that is what you are paying for, but you should have the advice clearly explained to you and you shouldn’t have to ask this, it should form part of the service.
- Fee StructureAdvisers used to get paid solely by commission. This has now come to an end, replaced by a more transparent structure. The main thing to remember is that an adviser is providing a service to you and they need to be paid for it, in turn you need to be comfortable with those fees. The fees charged need to be clear to you from the start, you need to know in $$ what you will be paying upfront and what will be due ongoing.
In the absence of a referral from a friend or trusted adviser, try googling for financial advisers in a location easily accessible to you. Shortlist a couple that suit you (make sure their target market is you. You don’t want to be seeing a retirement adviser when you are 33). Call, find out some info about what they do, their education etc., arrange an initial meeting, where you can address all of the above points.
Remember women make good financial decisions, go with your gut and start enjoying the benefits of getting great financial advice!
Computer Science for Secondary Schools
In some schools in the US, children are taught to use the new technology, but they are rarely taught how to make the technology. To prepare for jobs of the future, this is an academic area that must be developed. Teaching Computer Science K-12
Online Learning Trial in Rwanda
Facebook and edX are teaming up to see if online education works in a new pilot program. The new initiative will provide students in Rawnada wth free aces of eduation. The program will be under he umbrella of Internet.org, a program bringing the internet to two-thirds of teh world now living without it.
The platform developed by Harvard and MIT will allow students to ask questions, interact with teachers, participate in group discussions and engage with their peers. What’s more, the Rwandan government will work with edX to adapt the course materials, thereby creating more locally-relevant content, as well as expand its free Wi-Fi in campuses throughout the East African country.
