In February, I asked Alissa, who is my supervisor for my internship in High Water Women, also known as HWW, a series of questions. Since High Water Women is an organization that teaches financial literacy in community based organizations and high schools around New York City, I included some questions about financial literacy.
In the series of response that Alissa gave, one of the response to my question, “Who needs Financial Literacy education? Why?” was very intriguing.
Alissa replied, “Everyone, Financial literacy is a critical life skill. Yet no one teaches us about it. Not at home, not as school. Talking about money can be a taboo subject. When you learn how to work with money and understand the institutions that work with money, it is empowering! It can also help you avoid predatory practices - which means more money for you! When you understand how to budget - you can organize information and make better, more informed decisions about your resources. Most people in America lack basic financial literacy awareness and skill.”
So in the month of March, I decided to dedicate one of my posts to researching about who/ which groups would benefit the most from Financial Literacy education.
From CReAM, an acronym for Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, they have provided a financial literacy program to the migrants in New Zealand and Australia for about a month. They have asked the migrants for feedback on their education.
The migrants themselves said that the financial literacy training had helped them, and they would recommend it to others too. According to their conclusion about the impact on financial knowledge for the Pacific Island example, their data says: “they are 16 percentage points more likely to know it is cheaper to bundle remittances into a larger transaction, 52 percentage points more likely to know the ATM/prepaid debit card is the cheapest method of remitting among the options asked about…” They also concluded that after the training they were better on information seeking and budgeting, which led them to use or choose the cheapest methods.
The participants of financial literacy themselves have stated that their behavior changed after the training. They rated the topics on different costs and methods of spending money, the most useful.
This research clearly shows just by providing the immigrants financial literacy training, helps them become a more informed customer. Moreover, financial literacy helps the newcomers such as refugees to improve self-reliance and ensure that they are better informed when making financial decisions.
Providing financial literacy education not only benefits the newcomers themselves, but it also fuels the U.S financial system, and promotes positive economic activity since immigrants hold buying powers. So financial literacy doesn’t only help the newcomers understand the financial system, and inform them about more financial options, but it also helps them to trust themselves by providing resources and informations, and by doing so, they aid the U.S economy.
Link to CReAM: https://www.cream-migration.org/publ_uploads/CDP_16_12.pdf