The Geneseo Opportunities for Leadership Development program is introducing Geneseo students to Cash Course, a website funded by the National Endowment for Financial Education to help students manage their finances.
Cash Course has an extensive collection of articles, worksheets and videos to inform high school and college students about how to best manage money. The articles range from how to save for graduate school and studying abroad to 401(k) plans and living inexpensively on a college budget. Students can create their own accounts with the site for full use of the website’s features.
The GOLD Workshop, Using New Cash Course to Manage Personal Finance, will teach students to set up an account and how to best use the site.
GOLD student mentors junior Daniel Matthews and senior Iwona Drapala both use Cash Course to manage their finances and said they recommend the site’s budgeting wizard, a tool that lets students create a monthly budget. By entering their monthly incomes, expenses and savings goals on the budgeting wizard, users simplify the complex process of organizing their finances.
“I have my own account for the budgeting wizard; I plugged in some of my own information in there and I try to use the budgeting tool to stay on budget every month,” Matthews said.
Drapala and Matthews both said it’s important to create a budget for college, often a financially stressful environment.
“You don’t think about all the tiny expenses and how they add up; Cash Course helps you realize that and plan for that,” Drapala said. “The budgeting wizard is great for assessing how much you make versus how much you spend. It helps keep you on track.”
The workshop is one of many in the GOLD program’s Personal Finance series meant to help students better manage their money in an increasingly debt-ridden society.
Drapala stressed the importance of Cash Course for understanding and managing finance.
“Cash Course is like a compilation of all of the talks that are given in the Personal Finance series workshops,” she said. “Instead of having to look up every detail of finance, you have it all in one place. It’s all free for students to use too.”