FinU review

Finance University, or FinU, was an interesting idea for a college service. However, I do not see how feasible, or indeed, how necessary, a service it may be. The crux of the program is focused on the financial well-being of college students, which I fully believe is an important topic. However, I fail to see how Finance University addresses the major financial problems facing college students. The primary service Finance University provides is help for students who need to balance a budget. I do agree it is important to create a budget and restrict your spending each week to what you actually earn each week. However, this assumes that the student has *a* level of income to start with, which is not a safe assumption. The majority of college students (at least in my subjective experience) do not have a job. No income means there is no way the student could spend any amount of money and still be "in the black." Assuming the student has a job and thus income, there is also little support for the marginal profits they are likely to be seeing. You mentioned in your presentation that it is better to save $5 a month than nothing which is true, but it is impractical to create a savings account with $5 a month. Banks do have a minimum balance for savings account, and anywhere below $100 dollars is essentially $0 once charges are accounted for (yes, a bank will charge you money for not any money. It is quite expensive to be poor). Furthermore, many students are already financially unstable due to taking out student loans in order to pay for the frankly irresponsibly high costs of tuition at many universities. Moreover, as addressed in class, many high schools already contain budget balancing as a part of personal finance classes, meaning every college student should already know the information you are charging the school to give them access to. The idea of making this service available through the school using the school's funding has a few issues with it as well, as I can see greedy universities *cough* CBU *cough* using adding this service to justify raising tuition. This would cause more students to need to take out loans or otherwise put themselves in to debt in order to attend school. This leads us to another very common cause of debt in college students: credit cards. At many universities larger than ours credit card companies will hold expos the first week of classes in order to entice freshman students who are still growing used to their new-found freedom to sign up for a credit card. Students who don't know better will get their first credit card and promptly put themselves inexorably in debt.