Building trust and loyalty with young members

You have a speedometer in your car, but you speed anyways. Then you see the signs the police set up. The one that flashes your speed and has the big speed limit sign above it. You slow down.

This is the essence of the Check It & Text It program. We use our debit card and we keep spending. Sometimes never realizing how much work it took for us to earn those hard-earned dollars. This happens regularly, but do we want our youth to grow up without the foresight of the value of the dollar?

Teens will receive their first debit card and at the end of each week, they will receive a text saying how much they spent and how many hours they would have to work at minimum wage to make that amount back. Maybe the Coach® purse wasn’t worth the eighteen hours I had to work to purchase it. The parents receive an email with the same information. This spurs open conversations at home about money management, but we’ll also be checking in and guiding the teen and parents along the way.

With our next core update, we will begin testing. A few employees volunteered right away, as they wanted to know what their teens were spending. They also were anxious to see their teens’ faces when they saw how much they had to work to earn that money back. It’s a tough realization as teens get older. It’s even tougher on the parents.

I’m sure many of us can relate to the days that we would beg our parents for a pair of sneakers that would cost our parents $100. We would ask for these things not realizing how hard it is for a parent to say “no” to their child and not realizing that for a parent earning $40,000 per year before taxes, they would have to work nearly seven hours just to pay for those shoes.

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