Improving Financial Education and Literacy

In order to tackle the question of why ordinary people should be educated about finances, we could list a thousand reasons, but the first one is quite enough: Financial education is a cornerstone of a balanced and productive life and therefore helps people to have a better life. Financial education enables people to know how to accumulate and invest resources wisely in order to consume with pleasure, be prepared for emergencies and guarantee their future. This means having discipline, making plans and knowing how to invest. We live in a world that is going through incredible transformations, and in which

The following solution proposals are an excerpt from the background paper “Financial Literacy: Viewpoint”. Need to refocus financial literacy programs after global financial crisis Future financial literacy programs need to prepare participants for three broad realities of life after global financial crisis – government bonds can no longer be considered the safest investment option, healthcare costs will rise at a higher rate in the next decade and it will be accompanied by generally higher inflation (due to rise in fuel and food prices). Keeping these in mind, financial literacy programs need to focus on helping people do better risk management

Introducing HOPE Business-In-A-Box. What if we could reconnect the power of aspiration with the power of education in our children's lives? What if a child in elementary school could start a business for $50-100? A middle school student could do the same with up to $200, or up to $500 for a high school student? What if they could get a financial literacy course and a course in dignity, connected with a primer course in entrepreneurship? They could select from 25 businesses that can be started for $500 or less, pitch their idea for this business in front of a

In today’s world, a person’s credit score largely determines their ability to access gainful employment, safe housing, affordable insurance premiums, banking opportunities, and other makings of financial dignity. In line with our mission to build communities where every citizen has an opportunity to obtain their dreams, HOPE has developed the 700 CREDIT SCORE COMMUNITIES (700 CSC) program as an additional service to our Credit and Money Management program. The 700 CSC will allow participants to join a community of other like-minded individuals to participate in one-on-one and group credit counseling sessions to ultimately improve their credit score and realize their

The most complicated task we must address in the current financial meltdown is a gap between its global character and national efforts to combat it. Although the financial turmoil affects all over the world, each national government individually tries to overcome without sufficient international coordination. This apparent gap leads to incorrect behavior of individual vis-à-vis the financial meltdown. He normally understands such a global character of this issue, while he doesn’t know how to act based on appropriate knowledge of global macro. Instead of that, he remains to be a national citizen and blames his government for not taking sufficient

One of the key reasons for declining trust in our economic and financial order is widespread ignorance of how society and the market economy work. Particularly young people know too little about the interactions between the economy and society, freedom and responsibility, companies and entrepreneurship, and about how these resources might be used to benefit the common good, rather than individual interests. As a result, they feel that they are at the mercy of the systems around them. It is certainly nothing new to point out that more should be done in our schools to promote financial and economic literacy.

Much of the economic downturn that has affected the world’s industrialized nations has been blamed on poor financial decision-making by consumers who took on too much of the wrong sort of debt, fed the growing real estate bubble and made numerous and costly financial “mistakes,” presumably as the result of low levels of financial literacy. Two primary solutions have been proposed to prevent these “mistakes” from reoccurring: financial regulation and financial education. While financial regulation, in the extreme form of a single, approved “plain vanilla” product for each financial need (e.g.: a fixed-rate 30 year home mortgage) or the somewhat