Credit Union of America - It's a Money Thing

A quick introduction – she’s spunky, she’s fun, but most of all, she’s full of curiosity just like your students. And, her curiosity is not limited to the latest snapchat from friends or Ariana Grande’s newest song. She is also curious about life, the world, and yes, money! She goes by Jen, and we believe you and your students will love her!

In a series of short and fun videos, Jen learns about different money matters in an easy and relatable way. Included are video presentations with handouts to engage teenage students and ensure they have a good grasp on real-world financial concepts.

You can easily access 37 different financial topics below or request a speaker for a CUA representative to lead a classroom presentation. Teaching financial literacy has never been so easy, and it’s FREE!

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About the Credit Union

7 Co-operative Principles

While bank and banking are universally understood and accepted terms, the term credit union is still largely misunderstood and unknown to many.

Choosing Your Financial Institution

What was the very first financial choice you ever made?

Income and Taxes

After Grad Work or College

Choosing a career is tough. Whether you’re a new grad or considering a career change, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when tasked with selecting your next gig.

Acing The Job Interview

We spend a lot of time thinking about what we need to communicate to our interviewer, but we don’t take much time to think about what we need to say to ourselves while navigating the interview process.

Common Money Beliefs

How did you decide where to open your first bank account? Where did you learn to budget or pay bills? If you have a money question now, what do you do? Who do you turn to?

Earning Money Online

It’s hard to ignore the appeal of making real money online—after all, we live in a world where bloggers land book and movie deals, where top YouTubers are multimillionaires and where celebrities collect thousands of dollars in exchange for a single sponsored tweet.

Income Essentials

Choosing a career path is a big deal. Even if you don’t consider yourself career-driven, your choice of vocation will inevitably influence your lifestyle.

Let's Talk Taxes

Paycheck withholdings are a fact of life for most workers, but they aren’t set in stone. While it might seem like the right idea is to accept your withholdings as given and hope for a big refund at tax time, you’re better off taking a more proactive approach.

Credit Scores

Boost Your Credit Score

Credit scores are an area of personal finance that seem a lot more mysterious than they actually are. Many people believe that improving them is a matter of trial and error and, as a result, there’s a lot of “credit score advice” floating around that can end up doing more harm than good.

Breakdown of a Credit Score

You’ve likely heard about credit scores before (thanks to all those commercials with terrible jingles), but what do you actually know about them? How long have they been around? And what’s the deal with checking them?

Security

Foiling Identity Theft

Identity theft is nothing new, and yet it still manages to cost its victims billions of dollars (yes, that’s billions with a “b”) globally each year—not to mention the time and hassle involved in recovering a stolen identity.

How to Spot Scams

If you use a cellphone or have an email account, you’ve almost certainly been exposed to an attempt at mass marketing fraud.

Borrowing Basics

Buying a Used Car

If you take your time to carry out an inspection plus research a vehicle’s history, buying a used car can be rewarding and cost-effective.

Demystifying Mortgages

Asking the right questions is an important part of every financial decision you make, and home ownership is no exception. If you’ve been thinking about buying a place, preliminary research will turn up a long checklist of questions for you to ask at every part of the process.

Leasing vs. Buying a New Car

When it comes to buying a new car, you have three options: purchasing it with cash, purchasing it through a loan (also known as financing) or leasing it. For most shoppers, the decision comes down to buying or leasing.

Predatory Lending

Like local car dealerships and personal injury law firms, short-term and payday lenders tend to have the most annoying commercials on TV. They’re often tacky and annoying, and tend to air during daytime talk shows or very late at night.

Loan Basics

Loans help finance some of our biggest goals in life. They can provide access to possibilities that we can’t afford upfront—possibilities like going to school, buying a home or starting a business (to name just a few).

Strategies for Debt Repayment

High-interest debt is stressful and expensive—paying it off should be a financial priority.

Student Loans 101

If you’re considering financing your college education with the help of a student loan, the smartest thing you can do for yourself is to only borrow what you truly need.

Saving and Spending

Budgeting Basics

Budgets are like the New Year’s resolutions of personal finance. We all know we should have one and we all know it’s a fairly simple thing to follow—at least in theory.

Good vs. Bad Spending

When you start looking for financial advice, experts will share their take on what’s “good” and what’s “bad.” In personal finance, there are some classifications that we can all agree on: Debt is bad. Emergency funds are good. Overdrawing your account is bad. Earning interest on your savings is good.

Growing Your Money Locally

Supporting your local community is a positive thing—it builds relationships, it strengthens the local economy, and it makes your neighborhood a happier and healthier place to work and play. The most obvious way to support your surrounding community is with the choices you make with your dollars.

How to Save On Groceries

The average American household spends $3,753 a year on groceries. Here are some tips to
help you take a bite out of your grocery bill!

How to Save on Tuition

School is important. It’s also expensive. Offset the costs of post-secondary education the smart way by using free money, your money and borrowed money (in that order).

Investment Vehicles

Investing can seem like a very risky, complex and fast-moving process. With endless combinations of investment vehicles to choose from, it can be difficult to take your first step as an investor—especially with the knowledge that all investments carry the risk of losing some or all of your money. So why bother?

Compound Interest Mind Bend

You may remember it as an equation you had to memorize for math class, but it’s so much more than that. It’s the concept that powers all sorts of savings and investment products and, over time, allows you to turn your money into, well, more money!

Comparing Cards

Think back to the last thing you purchased—your most recent financial decision was likely what form of payment to use for that transaction.

Emergency Fund Boot Camp

Having an emergency fund means having one less thing to worry about when the unexpected happens. If you find yourself in a situation like a medical emergency, an out-of-the-blue home repair or losing a job, you don’t want to be worrying about how you’re going to manage expenses or about going into debt to cover costs.

Know Your Checking Account

Checks hold an odd place in our personal finances. In many ways, checks seem like
relics from a previous era. We maybe write one or two checks a month. This is
vastly different from only a few decades ago, when checks represented more than 85%
of all non-cash retail payments.

Living On Your Own

Living on your own for the first time can be empowering. It means having independence and all the things that come with it. Some of those things—like not having to share a bathroom—are wonderful. Others—like killing spiders yourself—are not so fun. And leading the pack in the not-so-fun category: bills.

Intro to Insurance

Insurance coverage can be tricky to shop for, because it requires making specific financial decisions about some hazy and unpredictable concepts.

Organizing Your Finances

Every year, it’s nice to do a bit of “financial spring cleaning” and declutter your filing cabinet, your desk drawers, and the various hiding places where miscellaneous scraps of paper tend to accumulate and multiply. Read on to find out what you should be saving, and what’s OK to shred.

Pay Yourself First

Like going to the gym or eating a healthy diet, saving money is one of those concepts that’s simple to grasp but weirdly challenging to put into practice.

Rule of 72

Compound interest = earning interest on your interest. You can use the Rule of 72 to approximate how long it will take for an investment to double at a given interest rate.

Saving for Retirement

Although savings goals vary from person to person and range in size and scope, it’s likely that your longest-term savings goal will be your retirement.

Trends in the Stock Market

Both bull markets and bear markets represent opportunities to make money; the key to success is to use strategies and ideas that can generate profi ts under a variety of conditions.

Understanding Inflation

Inflation is affecting your finances more aggressively than you might realize—especially when it comes to your savings. Without the proper planning in place, the effects of inflation could actually be costing you your savings.

Using Your Credit Card

News outlets and credit card companies are quick to label millennials as being credit card-shy. According to a recent survey, millennials apparently fear their credit card debt more than climate change, the threat of war and even death.