Attention:
Credit Unions Participating in Financial Reality Fairs
Toot Your Financial Literacy Horn!
Tell your members you participate in Financial Reality Fairs to help our young people learn how to manage their money.
An excellent means to getting the word out to your membership that your credit union actively participates in promoting financial literacy among our youth is having a presence on your website, preferably on your home page. Proclaim your participation there and it will be seen and noted by online visitors!
Each time a member logs on to your website, he or she will see that their credit union takes a proactive stance on educating our young people in the sometimes fun but always challenging world of learning to manage finances.
Use the resources below—text, graphics, or both—to populate your website with visuals and words that explain what a Financial Reality Fair is and why it works well to instill sound judgment in the practical matter of managing money in all who particpate.
The graphic banner should ideally be placed on your home page. Use it as a link to your Financial Literacy or Financial Reality Fair page where you can post the text and photos found below (or ones of your own) that explain what this practical exercise is all about.
Click to download the Banner graphic.
Click to download the Reality Fair logo.
For questions, please contact Barb Bass at bbass@culct.coop.
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Your Credit Union in the Community
An important goal of your credit union is to provide financial education to our members in order to help them better manage their money on a day-to-day basis as well as direct funds to savings for the future. How to budget, how to look for the best prices, how to stay out of or at least manage debt—it’s a learning process that all of us have gone through. With the products and services that your credit union offers, our members can take steps to control their financial lives not only for today, but also for tomorrow.
An excellent way to accomplish this, we feel, is to help our youth understand the workings of earning and spending, budgeting, and saving. Developing financial understanding at an early age instills good financial habits to carry throughout a lifetime. For many young people, this can often begin by participating in a Financial Reality Fair.
The Financial Reality Fair is an approximately 2.5-hour, hands-on experience in which students, after identifying their career choice and starting salaries, are provided a budget sheet requiring them to live within their monthly salary while paying for basics such as housing, utilities, transportation, clothing, and food. And some not-so-basics like entertainment and travel.
Along the way there are many temptations for additional spending, and students must learn to balance their wants and needs to potentially live on their own. After they have visited the various booths covering components of independent living, students will balance their budget, and then sit down with a financial counselor to review their standing. The Fair is a unique opportunity for each student to experience some of the financial challenges they will face when they start life on their own.
An important feature of a responsible financial lifestyle is saving. In the Financial Reality Fair experience, students are encouraged to save a minimum of 10% of their income, placing 3% in a long-term retirement investment, and 7% in a shorter-term investment. The Financial Counselors explore the importance of planning for future needs and preparing for future financial challenges through savings. The Fair will tempt students to spend their income on “fun,” but the financial counselors will bring the focus back to saving and thrift practices.
Since last year, Connecticut credit unions have organized Financial Reality Fairs to help our youth realize the importance of understanding how personal finances work and how they affect not only money management for today, but also for the future. In 2009, approximately 1,000 students participated in Fairs throughout the state of Connecticut. More than 2,000 students are scheduled to participate in Fairs during the 2009-2010 school year.
While many schools provide personal finance classes to teach students how to balance a checkbook and manage savings and checking accounts, it wasn’t until the development of the Financial Reality Fair that students have had the practical opportunity to put what they have learned in the classroom to the test in the “real world.” And while the Reality Fair is essentially “rhetorical”—that is, it’s an exercise in a controlled environment for practical application of budgeting based on the real financial world—it provides a very clear picture of what is to come in the lives of our young people. And for many, it is a real eye-opener.
_______________________________________
Your Credit Union’s Participation in Financial Reality Fairs
[Insert your specific information here.]
_______________________________________
From recent Financial Reality Fairs:
Making decisions about important life choices does not always come easily.
Click to download the making decisions photo.
Students spin the Wheel of Reality to see whether they gain or lose money
for their projected monthly budget.
Click to download the Wheel of Reality photo.
Balancing their budget is an integral part of the Reality Fair exercise.
Click to download the Balancing Budgets photo.
