SUMTER, S.C. — Building healthy money habits is a skill that Sumter residents can learn more about at free weekly financial literacy classes. This program is hosted by United Way and AmeriCorps and aims to break generational cycles of poverty.
“It opened my eyes to a lot,” attendee Melissa Holliday says about the class. “It was a warm atmosphere. It was inviting, lots to learn, we can ask questions.”
The classes are led by Cynthia Moore with United Way of Sumter, Clarendon and Lee Counties.
“Prices are just going to keep going up. So how do we combat that?” Moore poses. “And that's where this financial literacy program comes from.”
Moore tells me the goal is to open the floor for conversations on topics ranging from budgeting to financing secondary education to life insurance so community members can learn from and engage with each other.
“We're in our head and instead of vocalizing what's really going on. So start speaking about, ‘Hey, this is what's going on with me.’ And guess what? It's probably going on with them, them and them too. And coming together to ways to…so if this is happening with eight out of 10 people, it's a conversation. It needs to be talked about,” Moore says. “COVID changed a lot of things with the prices of food, gas and just daily everyday essentials. And income is the same, but the output is totally different. So financial literacy was one of the things that came to mind to how we can understand our money a little bit better and ways to sustain our lifestyle.”
The classes are free hosted at Central Carolina Technical College and they’re open to anyone in the community. Moore says she’s also working to teach similar topics to students and offers one-on-one tutoring sessions at the United Way office on Washington Street.
“So learning this healthier habits, financial habits early on, just creates, I think, a more stable society to where we can maybe bring that, you know, deficit that we have that's so high right now, because we are spending wastefully,” Moore details about the importance of the peer-to-peer approach. “I speak a different language than the generation that is coming up now. So if I can get that information in one peer, one student, how can they get that information out to their peers?”
In order to make better financial decisions, Moore says we first need to understand what that looks like.
“Knowledge is power,” Moore explains. “And if we're empowering each other, then how could we go wrong?”
“The more you know, the more you can do,” Holliday adds. “So retirement may not be there for us, like social security, our pensions will but the more we can do now, the more we have later.”
Those classes are hosted regularly on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to noon and again from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.