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Making Financial Literacy Accessible to youth and other underserved audiences

Ruby Ward and Trent Teegerstrom

Summary

There is a need to help youth and agriculture producers including American Indian farmers and ranchers about interest and the effects of having low credit scores, borrowing money, buying on credit, etc. It is difficult for people to gain an understanding without the ability to calculate real examples such as loan payments, credit card payments needed, and savings amounts. Excel programs will perform the calculations but require additional knowledge and skill as do many financial calculators available. We developed a simple financial calculator app for iPads that can be used to fill in a few numbers and see what happens. To make the situations real, we also added the ability to choose an item and it will calculate the loan payments in terms or how many of that item would be needed. For example, it can be hours worked. Youth can calculate a credit card payment and see the total paid and the total interest paid in dollars as well as the number of hours they will need to work. Instead of hours worked, bales of hay or head of calves can be used with farmers and ranchers. This presentation will demonstrate the app and then show how it can be used with various types of audiences.

Details

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