The Office of Financial Aid held its third HawkCents financial literacy workshop on Feb. 24 aimed at educating students about budgeting, paying off student loans and staying in good financial health.
The “Budgets Take Balance” workshop covered budgeting and loans and how to maintain good credit. Elizabeth Rihl Lewinsky, director of financial aid, said being organized is critical when it comes to making a budget.
“No one likes to create a budget,” Lewinsky said. “But, if you do not face those numbers on and have a realistic review of what your income is versus what your expenditures are versus what your financial and non-financial goals are longer term, then budgeting is going to be really difficult for you.”
Lewinsky said students should know what kind of student loans they have, where to get information about their loans, and what is the best way to manage the repayment of their loans.
“The federal government is doing a much better job now of helping students be aware of those tools,” Lewinsky said.
Lewinsky said a lot of this information is available on the studentaid.gov website, and that students should remember this important resource.
Michael Soucy ’20 said the financial wellness workshop was useful, and he felt he would benefit from an actual course on personal finances.
“It was cool because I haven’t thought that much about loans,” Soucy said. “I learned some new stuff. I think a class would be good because I feel like it is something a lot of people do not think about throughout school and once they graduate, or very close to graduation, kind of just hits them.”
Carolin Schellhorn, Ph.D., assistant professor of finance, agreed that having a class on financial literacy and wellness could help, and she offers another possible solution.
“You could even have, for people that do not want to take that class, one of those tests where you place out of it,” Schellhorn said.
Lewinsky said she hopes a financial literacy and wellness class could be integrated into the university’s curriculum in the future.
“I think it would be really beneficial if there was a first-year seminar course topic on financial literacy,” Lewinsky said. “I think having it from the beginning and knowing it from the beginning versus the last semester at your time at school.”
In trying to push this agenda using the HawkCents workshops, Lewinsky said she wants to teach students what she wished she knew coming out of college.
“I wish I had known what a FICO score was, what went into establishing good credit and maintaining good credit,” Lewinsky said. “I didn’t really know that there were payment plan options that were interest free and there were different low interest federal loans that I could have taken.”
Schellhorn said differentiating between a want and a need is a cliche, but a useful piece of advice.
“That is an economic lesson that we do not teach much anymore,” Schellhorn said. “It used to be part of economics. What are necessities and what are luxuries? Now, everything is a necessity.”
Lewinsky said there will be another HawkCents workshop in April.
“I’d encourage students to take advantage of our HawkCents program,” Lewinsky said. “Our goal is to offer three [workshops] each semester. The sooner the students can get this information, the better, in my opinion, because there is the potential for significant harm if they are not aware of this.”
