Financial Wellness 201

The Academy Group students, along with their staff of experts in the education space, are my biggest inspirations. Today I got to lead AM Money’s second workshop in a series on Financial Wellness In-And-Around College for a group of college freshmen who just finished their first semesters.

They were eerily more relaxed than I remember! The high school seniors that I first met over a year ago were anxious, excited, scared, and seemed to be on edge 100% of the time. These now-college-freshmen were rested but eager, as if they had finally jumped into a highly anticipated swimming pool and realized the deep end wasn’t as deep as they thought. I kept reminding them: you still gotta keep swimming and keep your head above water.

The focus of our first workshop was Building Healthy Habits. We touched on credit, loans, and budgeting routines.

This second workshop was focused on Maintaining Healthy Habits, and finding new ones!

With a semester under their belts, I couldn’t wait to hear what shenanigans they had been up to. We talked about side hustles, advocating for yourself at financial aid offices, saving for emergencies, and more details on budgeting time and resources.

One student mentioned that her side hustle at school is “flipping hydro flasks”. (Side note: they had to educate me on what that is… it’s just a fancy water bottle… someone must have gotten a big bonus for that brand name...) Apparently students lose them around school, she finds them, cleans and fixes them up, and resells them for half the price (she’s making a whopping $20 per bottle!). The whole class lit up. Another student braids hair on the weekends, one student sends her class notes to the disability department and gets paid, another tutors high school students. 

Most of the students knew that they should ask the financial aid office to see if there are any funds they can use, but I wanted to help them build confidence for the conversation.

Now that they are enrolled, the school’s highest priority is to keep them there. If they leave due to money, it doesn’t look good on the university. It’s about acknowledging that you are a good student and that you love your school, and that you don’t want to leave. Constantly advocating for yourself will show others that you are serious about making a difference at their university, and in return they will be more likely to find ways to help.

When it came to emergency savings funds, students had no idea how much they needed to save. Turns out, that’s because they all had different emergencies in mind: a new phone, a flight home if someone gets sick, a fund for medical needs… Some students had an emergency savings goal of $300, $500, $1000. Again the room lit up with argument. Obviously the number will be different for everyone, since everyone has different circumstances. If they save up a total of $300 for an emergency flight and a new iPhone when it breaks, then they need to be ready for a Spirit flight and a flip phone. It’s all about understanding our unique circumstances and setting realistic goals that will fit into them. 

Excited to prepare and host our next workshop, Financial Wellness 301, as a webinar in the next few months alongside my friends at the Academy Group! I will miss the students in the meantime and will be helping them ad-hoc to complete their FAFSAs and advocate for themselves with their bureaucratic universities. Wouldn’t want to be doing anything else :)

Founder Posts | Taking a Different Perspective Through Data

I’ll never forget the moment I thought I would have to drop out of college because I couldn’t afford my next tuition check.

I had busted my ass for years to get there. I took classes at night. I took classes on the weekend. I took classes while deployed to Iraq. I had completed my FAFSA, maxed out my GI BIll (this is before the 9/11 GI BIll had passed), applied for every scholarship I could. I had done everything I was told I was supposed to do and yet there I was facing a $16,000 bill that I clearly couldn’t afford. 

I was told by my college that maybe I could apply for a loan, and so I did that too. I typed in the income from my three part-time jobs, and was told that there wasn’t really anything that could be done. “Maybe I could find a co-signer?” they said... No. My mom was bankrupt and did not qualify. 

I talked to my grandma, and she was very hesitant to sign for a massive loan for something I was doing. Frustrated, I remember thinking that this was ridiculous. Of course I took my education seriously. Of course, I was doing well enough to graduate. Of course, I would find a job when I graduated (I had three at the time!). It didn’t matter.  Luckily I managed to convince my grandmother to co-sign. To this day, I shudder to think about I would have had to do if she hadn’t agreed to do so. 

This is, of course, why I started A.M. Money. A credit score or my income back then clearly wasn’t a reflection of who I was or what I was doing. 

So what should be used to determine a student’s ability? A story is great, but you can’t run an analytical business on a story. You need numbers to not only tell the story, but to build the backbone of how you will make decisions and take on risk. 

To do so, I spent 6 months in a rabbit hole learning everything I could about student debt, and educational and career attainment. There are robust sets of data that can help you paint a picture but you need to paint it for an audience (investors etc) that isn’t used to looking at this type of data and in the way that we use it. 

Along the way I talked to hundreds of people about how to think about this data (and others like it), and I imagine I’ll talk to hundreds more as we continue to grow and expand our model. As we do this, I’ve always found that it’s helpful to not just view the data dispassionately, but to talk to people who not just have an understanding of the data, but have also lived it themselves. This allows for you to get inferences and insights that even the best statistical technique may struggle to see, let alone understand.

As such, I’m happy to announce that we will be launching our first ever Data Hackathon in conjunction with Capital One and The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. We’ll be introducing some of the basic educational datasets we use in our underwriting model, explore some of the insights and techniques we have used to make sense of them, and then hopefully use that as an opportunity to learn how others might think about and use this data. 

If any of this sounds interesting, I hope you’ll join us:

The A.M. Money Data Hackathon

Part of the Career Boot Camp

Presented by A.M. Money, The Academy Group, and College Greenlight

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January 8, 2020 | 10am-6pm | 1452 E 53rd Street

Founder Posts | Doing College the Hard Way: My 3 Tips for Success.

I graduated from college at the age of 25. My path through it wasn’t easy, nor was it straightforward. 

I attended three different colleges before I graduated, and I didn’t have a single semester where I wasn’t at least working full time. I took classes online, some even while deployed to Iraq. I took classes at night. I took classes on the weekend.

It all worked out in the end, but it certainly wasn’t easy. I often get asked, “how did you do it?”, so I’m going to share a few of the things (that in hindsight) were instrumental to my success.

1. I had a plan. I didn’t stick to it. 

I had meticulously mapped out every single course I had to take to graduate from college, and had a financial plan in place for how I would manage both my classes, and the personal (and financial) responsibilities I had. 

In the summer of 2004, I was accepted into an Army program called “Green to Gold”, which was supposed to take me off active duty and put me into ROTC for the Fall of 2004. Great? No. Not really. Unfortunately, someone had “lost” my enrollment paperwork, and my entrance into the program would have to be delayed a year. 

In the meantime, I deployed to Iraq with my unit instead.

The plan I had crafted was completely unviable. However, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful. 

Since I knew every class I had to take, I concocted a new plan where I would take online courses at a community college while I was deployed. This would allow me to take care of several of the general education courses I needed to take. All in, I ended up taking 7 online courses, saving me about $50,000 in tuition that I would have had to find a way to pay out of pocket. 

If I didn’t have a plan, I wouldn’t have been able to quickly pivot when things didn’t go the way I hoped. I also had to have the frame of mind to pivot instead of lamenting the fact that my perfect plan didn’t work out as I thought it would.

2. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, or get in people’s faces as the case may be. 

I don’t know this for sure, but I’m pretty confident in saying that I was probably one of the first enrolled students at American University who had to ask for a deferment to go to Iraq. 

It took a little bit of effort to find the right person to talk to, but they were more than accommodating in allowing me the time I needed to get back to college. However, that wasn’t the end of it. 

I also asked them to connect me to the person who would have been my academic advisor if I had actually enrolled, which was a highly unusual request. However, I knew I needed someone to sign off on my plan to take online courses before I actually enrolled. 

I walked them through my plan, and asked them to help me understand which courses I could or could not take at a community college and have them transfer back towards my degree. Some courses were straight forward, others required that I  submit a formal appeal. 

Meanwhile, I had to convince my company commander to sign off on the tuition assistance paperwork while we were in Iraq. He obviously had more important things to do with his time, fighting a war and all, but this was my life too. I wasn’t about to take no for an answer. 

In both cases, asking for the help I needed was the requisite first step to getting it. Also, in both cases, not being afraid to press the issue and get in someone’s face about it was critical to making it happen. As you go through college, find the right people to ask for help, and ask them for that help. 

If you don’t get what you want/need immediately, don’t be afraid to ask again, or to find another angle that gets you closer to the end goal. After all, this is your life.

3. Find your community. 

I loved American University. I learned a ton, and met a lot of people who have been great friends and instrumental to my success over the years. 

It was also DRAMATICALLY different than any place I had ever been. I was a long way away from the barracks of the South Side of Chicago. 

On one hand, very few of the people I was in college with had any appreciation of the unique challenges I had in going to their institution. On the other hand, none of the people who understood those challenges understood what it meant to be successful at an institution like that. 

So, it was imperative that I found people who had both perspectives. Fortunately, I received a fellowship from the United Negro College Fund for people of color looking to go into the field of international affairs. Through this I was able to spend a summer in Atlanta at Spelman/Morehouse, and at the University of Maryland with people like me, who were trying to do the same thing I was. 

Last year I was at a wedding for someone in this group, and I remarked to my wife that this felt more like my college homecoming than my actual college homecoming. These people have been my rock, and resource over the past 15 years, and I can not imagine what college (and the rest of my career) would have been like without them. 

It’s important for you to find the community that you can call your family, that can help you not only maintain the connection to where you come from but also build the bridge to where you are trying to go.  

Introducing The Career Boot Camp

One of the things I say a lot is “Graduating from a good college can dramatically change your life, but that change doesn’t happen on the day you graduate”. 

You still need to find that first job, and then get the first promotion. You still might need to buy a car you can’t afford or put down the first two months rent on an apartment in a new city. 

We know that for many of our students these are real challenges that they have to navigate as they transition into the workforce, and (hopefully) start building their wealth. We’re committed to ensuring that our loans and products are a part of the solution, and not a part of the problem. That’s why we have the flexible repayment options that we do.

In line with this, I am excited to announce our newest initiative to help our borrowers: Our career development program. 

We are collaborating with our non-profit partners, the Academy Group and College Greenlight; as well as 9 different companies in the Chicagoland area, who, together, hire hundreds of college grads every year, to launch this initiative.  

This is our first of many collaborative efforts to find placement and provide support to all of our borrowers so that they can get that post-college job sooner. Preferably, exposing them to even better opportunities and roles than they would have known about otherwise. We have designed this week as a bootcamp that will demonstrate what types of internship and entry level opportunities exist in the Chicagoland area while providing critical mentorship and guidance on how to pursue those opportunities.

As we continue to grow and develop, our hope is to begin matching our students to these opportunities and the companies who provide them, ensuring that they are capable of getting the job they both are most interested in, and qualified for.

If you are a student who is not a part of our program, but nonetheless are interested in working in Chicago after graduation, you are also welcome to apply. Please do so here. 

If you are an employer who is looking for diverse college talent, and would be interested in a conversation about our students, please feel free to reach out to me personally @ daniel@a-m.money

Thank you

Daniel