LAKE FOREST, Calif.–Young people at the Boys & Girls Club of San Juan Capistrano in California recently received a “bite of reality” when they attended an interactive financial education simulation designed to teach them how to manage money hosted by Eagle Community Credit Union and offered by the Richard Myles Johnson (RMJ) Foundation. Bite of Reality aims to teach young people the basics of finance by having them take a “real world” test drive complete with a job, money, and the freedom to make their own financial decisions.
Via the Bite of Reality app, the 24 youth—ages 12 to 14—received a persona complete with occupation, salary, spouse and family, student loan debt, credit card debt, and medical insurance payments. With the app also providing them with a personalized monthly income, each student went “shopping” for items such as housing, transportation, food, clothing, household necessities, and daycare.
Throughout the event, they dealt with pushy salespeople. And when some overspent, those staffing the "credit union" station provided much-needed assistance.
“The youth that participated had fun stepping into the world of real adult life with a job, kids and debt! It was really fun to see how they spent their money and how they interacted with us as merchants while we tried to up-sell them on everything. Overall they really learned a lot about budgeting, wants vs. needs, and had a lot of fun at the same time,” said Eagle Community CU Vice President of Marketing Erica Beach. “We’d like to thank our wonderful Eagle Helping Hand volunteers who made it all possible—Nguyen Dao, Tuyet Vu, Tammy Raymondi, David Ward, Diego Pinto, Barbara McRae, Karla Davis, Ben Chelouche, and Marcus Bowman. We also had a few volunteers from the Lake Forest Soroptimist group join us as well.”