Financial Literacy and Investor Education
Our financial literacy component is designed to improve youths' financial knowledge and money skills. It provides youths with the fundamental knowledge of personal financial skills. The program is a web-based interactive set of learning steps that focuses on youths' financial and investor education. Our skills specialist teach the program for 6 months to cover each step of the program. Then each participant will have the opportunity to work on the program on their own time and create their own 401K plan. The financial literacy curriculum enrichment ensures that they attain basic personal financial management skills during their early years. The program is not only for youths that have no financial knowledge, it is also for those that do. Participants can learn about personal finance and create a lifetime plan for themselves with a self-study Internet program curriculum that helps them to see how investments and credit card debt could affect their retirement years.
The financial curriculum covers the 12 principles of personal financial skills that young people should know and several other areas of finance. They learn how to use credit wisely, banking intelligently, handling poor credit and what can be done about it. We teach them how to create a budget and live within it, and how to avoid credit repair problems. They learn about open credit. We give them tips for small investors on how to invest in stocks, bonds and mutual funds.
Investor Education
Investor education is designed to improve the financial and investors knowledge of youths and young adults in the under-served community of Buffalo, New York. The program offers participants in the African American and Latino community the opportunities to learn about the basics of investing. Our investor knowledge curriculum covers the topics that include investing for youths and young adults investors, scams, bonds, futures, investing basics, stocks, mutual funds, financial planning, what they should be looking for in selecting a broker, how to investigate their broker's history and qualifications, and where to get help. We help inform investors about the securities laws that help protect investors by requiring companies to give them the information needed to make informed decisions and other governmental agencies and investment resources.
Our planning process is geared towards advancing our participants' financial investment knowledge, and we seek to find out what is important to our participants with consultations to identify their goals. We seek to determine what is right considering the participants' knowledge needs, and we put together solutions that will enable them to make smart decisions with their investments, as well as recommend solutions that will help the participants in establishing an investment strategy. We offer options based on participants' risk tolerance, and investment goals and objectives. The program director reviews and refines each participant's strategy on an ongoing basis to keep participants on track as changes happen, in both their lives and the economy. The program is designed for under-served neighborhoods and communities in helping to ensure that the participants in these communities are fully informed when making decisions about their personal finances and futures. We ask the following questions of our participants:(1) Do the participants understand their investment? (2)Does the investment match their goals? (3) Do the participants understand their risk? (4) Do the participants understand their costs? (5) How liquid is their investment? (6) Is the investment legitimate? (7) Is their investment diversified?