Financial Education & Literacy

Couples and Money

10/24/12

Wow, our guest bloggers have been working hard for us and you! Nice job Amy and John.  I myself got a little wrapped up in my intensive financial literacy class this year, and am finally here to report on our experiences. First up, a conversation about couples and money. I hope you readers will join me.

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Fine Print Foils

10/08/12

I was delighted to see Melissa Jacoby’s call in September for more poetry on creditslips.org! Therefore, I wish to share the poem I wrote that served as basis for the lyrics to a consumer protest song that accompanies a non-profit consumer outreach film, Fine Print Foils, that I produced a couple of years ago. Why not have fun with consumer protection?

Fine Print Foils
by Amy J. Schmitz

Fine print foils

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Zip Codes and Internet Searches Populate Database Mines

08/14/12

Twice now the New York Times has reported on a mysterious company in Arkansas, Acxiom, that has been collecting endless data on all of us but no one is entirely sure what they have or why they have it.  This is why neither NYT story makes perfect sense.  Something is wrong but we do not know enough about what they are doing to know what it is.  Consumers do not get to see their files according to the

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Cash as social infrastructure

04/05/12

Sticker in San Francisco: "Of course it's cash-only, it's the Mission."

Overheard: "Oooh, yeah, no, we don't take cards. Because the coffee is, like, local?" (both items courtesy Lana Swartz)

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Girl Scouts Add Consumer Finance to the Badges

03/11/12

People with young girls may already have heard about this. Girl Scouts has rolled out a few new badges just in time for its 100 year anniversary. The badges have not been changed since 1987. Good bye fashion and makeup, hello Science in Style which covers nanotechnology in fabric and the chemistry of sunscreen. The new badges include thirteen related to financial literacy, that look like this.

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Of Babies and Bucks

01/29/12

The Credit Slips bloggers are engaged in a virtual enterprise, which means we sometimes don't see each other for a long time. One of my fellow bloggers recently asked "What's up?" and learned that I had a new baby two months ago. That experience, along with trying to stem the tide of "I want it! I need it!" that comes with having two preschoolers during the holidays, has left me thinking about how we teach children about money, debt, and consumerism.

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Evaluating Mandatory Financial Education in Bankruptcy

01/28/12

In 2005, Congress amended bankruptcy law to require individual debtors with primarily consumer debts to complete an "instructional course on personal financial management" to be eligible to receive a discharge of their debts.

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Americans are Innumerate and Broke

08/16/11

And not just the ones I tell stories about from my clinical law teaching.  Some of our readers have written in to say that these clients of ours, these title loan and payday loan customers, are idiots or worse yet, should be institutionalized for their stupidity. Most of my stories about our clients have to do with not being able to do complex math.

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