Steve Thomas: Sylvie, Thomas, welcome to the podcast.
Thomas Maluck: Thanks for having us.
Sylvie Golod: Glad to be here.
Steve Thomas: So Richland has a state of the art Business, Careers, and Research Center. What motivated the library to prioritize these areas to give it such a focused area?
Sylvie Golod: Well, back in 2010, we received a grant from the Knight Foundation on the cusp of people needing assistance with career services and employment, workforce development. So it was a grant program, and it was so successful that it became a part of the strategic plan, which was fortunate for me because then I was able to come on board from the school districts as a career specialist, come into the library system, and help the manager at the time, and still the Business and Careers Manager Diane Luccy helped develop the career services component. It was more career services than business at the time, but we quickly learned from where we were then to now how intertwined and synergistic they both are. So it, it evolved into both business and career services.
Steve Thomas: Can you give an overview of the types of programs that are offered in the center?
Sylvie Golod: Yeah. I’m gonna use a three-pronged approach in helping to explain it because in the career services area, we have individual career coaching, but it’s much like in post-secondary, in the colleges, you have a career development center, and when I was working in the high schools, we had a college and career center. So, what we did is we developed all the services you would need for assistance in finding employment, retaining employment, transitioning into new employment.
And then of course, from that came the expansion of the business services, because what was happening is a lot of people, especially when the market wasn’t doing so well, people were having a hard time finding employment. I can remember actually trying to help six people from the same company find employment. They were all laid off. So what came from that is a lot of people, when they couldn’t find employment, they decided to become self-employed. Then out of that need, the business services came about.
The umbrella for all of that is partnerships because we quickly learned we couldn’t do it all. We started developing community partners and then the business services, career services, and then the other component that I mentioned is the entrepreneurs, the stopgap jobs arena, but all of that, believe it or not, comes under the umbrella of partnerships and business and career development.
Steve Thomas: Can you give some specific examples of some partnerships that you’ve gotten with the library?
Sylvie Golod: Well, especially with the business services, we have agencies that we deal with. We have Midlands Tech post-secondary education that we deal with. We have nonprofits that we work with, and so to give you examples which are more specific, this Thursday, I’m working with a community partner that is the City of Columbia for Financial Literacy. There’s a whole department for that. And so we have a speaker coming in from them who happens to be the program manager for the housing department in HUD, certified housing counselor and facilitator of financial literacy. She is someone who has that specific expertise, but not only with obviously workforce development, but the financial component.
The city of Columbia, we just received a proclamation from them. We’re celebrating Financial Literacy Month this month. So this is pretty cool that we’re doing this podcast now, but we just received a proclamation from the mayor for helping to collaborate and work together on the quarterly financial program that we’re having. So that’s been quite exciting.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s great to hear. It’s always nice when you get noticed for the good work that you’re doing.
Thomas, I wanted to bring you in here. You are an Accredited Personal Finance Instructor. Can you tell listeners about what that is and how you use that in your work with the library?
Thomas Maluck: Sure. So the National Financial Educators Council, they have three tiers of certification in financial literacy that they bestow on their students. At the bottom is the CFLP, the Certified Financial Literacy Professional and that covers the content knowledge in financial literacy: credit, debt, banking, investing, all the different categories. Then one tier above that is where I started a couple years ago, the Certified Financial Education Instructor, and that’s where you take that baseline knowledge, and they graphed on a bunch of educational theory. So you know what you need to teach people, here’s how to teach it in such a way that it actually sticks in their mind, here’s how to appeal to behavioral psychology, here’s how to build habits that they will find compelling and rewarding, not just because you’re the expert who came in and told them what to do with their bank account, for instance.
And now one tier above that is the Accredited Personal Finance Instructor, which goes more into how to lead large seminars, how to organize things, market things. The reach of the program keeps growing as you go up the ladder, and it goes into more and more practical and professional skills that help you scale out your message and reach more people, which I use all of this in a nonprofit setting, going through Richland Library, and the library has been very generous to let me pursue this interest and morph it into public programming that we do. And I want to take some words from Sylvie, who gave me the ultimate praise after she helped coordinate one of our programs we did together. Because they do have these great partnerships with the city, and I plan on attending them and soaking up all the knowledge I can, and there was a suggestion in the air of, “Oh, we have this great partnership here. Should we still put on some programs with Thomas?” and Sylvie said, “We want to keep Thomas on because they don’t do what he does.” And I was like, “Well, then I must be doing something right if that’s the response.”
Sylvie Golod: Well, I just felt like we had this internal subject matter expert, and yes, he was doing programming for the teens, but up where I am (I say up, cause we’re on the third floor) but up where I am, we see people in the 19 to 28 age group. And of course, the financial literacy for them is huge. There’s such a need, so that’s what I was telling Thomas. And when we’re developing, what do we have, like three different programs for you, Thomas?
Thomas Maluck: Right, we’ve got the young adults, we’ve got looking at retirement, and then there’s a more general purpose.
Sylvie Golod: So what we’ve tried to do is look at each population, and the first one that Thomas did, and we call him our financial superhero, it was such a hit that we brought him back. It was like a pilot program, and so it’s been exciting because I also attend his program and then I learn and see what’s needed and that’s how we continue the partnership. But because I know what the other programs that, like Thomas said, that the city of Columbia or any of the other partnerships offer, I know how he can be different.
Like, we have partners that come from banks, one person I have to really talk about the first class that we did with the city of Columbia, yes, he came from a bank, but the thing that I learned, and I was telling Thomas this, was I learned that he was also an Operation HOPE coach. I had never even heard of Operation HOPE. It was started by John Hope Bryant, an American entrepreneur and thought leader and philanthropic leader, and the mission of it is to advance economic opportunity by providing the tools they need to reach their goals, and they help individuals of all ages. They even have a HOPE channel, you can get online and find out if there’s a HOPE coach for you. So that was to me, quite exciting because it was in addition to what we hear about coaches, yes, like Thomas, but also the Small Business Association, you know, SCORE and coaches that you hear for people that for entrepreneurship. This filled a different kind of need and targeted a population that was underserved as well.
And that’s the other thing I find exciting about partnerships as well is because the person that I mentioned that’s coming in this Thursday, her husband happens to be a director of a nonprofit that he started that is for targeting the population for social justice, and it’s called Project NAS: Not A Statistic. So the breadth of people that we’re able to reach being in a library system, but by combining and collaborating not only with our internal subject matter experts like Thomas, but also our partners in the community, we’re able to pretty much plug in and meet the needs of all our different type of patrons or customers as we call them here at Richland Library. So it was very, very exciting.
Steve Thomas: That’s fantastic, and it’s great that you have a resource like Thomas there at the library for that kind of thing. And great that Thomas you’re supported by the library in all of that. So it’s not like something you’re just kind of doing off on the side and they just kind of tolerate it or whatever, but you’re embracing it and helping you actually use that knowledge in your work.
And since you’re a Teen Librarian, do you try to offer those for teens and then also adults as well just to kind of keep it in both parts of your job?
Thomas Maluck: So there are a couple of competing statistics when it comes to personal finance for young people. One is that a majority of high schoolers upon leaving high school, they’re asked if there’s an extra course you could have taken before you embarked into adulthood, what would it have been and they say personal finance, how to handle money, what kind of bank accounts do I need, what kind of credit card would be the most useful? Okay, fair enough. But then, and we’re seeing across the country, especially in the past couple of years, over half the states in the U. S. are now enacting mandatory personal finance courses. So you can’t graduate until you learn a thing or two about personal finance. Wonderful. We are now getting some anecdotal feedback from some of these schools saying, ” Okay, but until they’re 17, 18 and getting that first job and seeing where their paycheck goes and trying to do the math on how they’re going to afford their first car, a lot of this still goes over young people’s heads because until it’s your money on the line, until you have skin in the game, how much attention are you going to pay?”
Now that’s not to say that there aren’t programs that we don’t do for teens. Obviously, we do. And we’ve done outreach from the teen department to SC Student Loan, state based, they don’t try to sell anything, but they do a great comprehensive program about how to pay for college or alternatives to four year university programs, talking all about community colleges, vocational schools, apprenticeships, and all the different databases they can connect young people to those options so that they have a full, they feel like they can participate in a full breadth of career paths and not just college and not just get a giant loan that sticks with you forever.
And then we’ve also partnered before with banks, but especially there’s a specific credit union in our community that their outreach person is fantastic. And does this, it’s almost like the Game of Life for the teens where they’re assigned a random persona that has a certain career, certain number of mouths to feed, certain credit score, and then they go through these slides where they sort of choose their own adventure of “Okay, what kind of housing are you going to live in? How much does that cost? Are you renting or owning? What kind of car are you going to drive? Are you still going to live with your parents? Are you borrowing their car? But then a random life event may come up where it’s like, oh, well, that car broke down. Now what do you do? Did you have anything saved up or did you spend all of your money on these other options that came up?”
And then I just like doing my own team programming as well. Our teen area is strictly ages 12 to 18, but we do get that crossover interest when young adults visit our teen area, and when they see that we have financial programming, sometimes. I hear what teens are learning on the internet or through social media, and that really brought to light for me how financial literacy and digital literacy are closely intertwined because if an 18 year old comes to me and brags that they learned about forex trading from a YouTube course and that it’s so easy and they doubled their money in the last month, I might want to give them a fair warning that they can also lose half their money in an even quicker span of time doing that sort of thing.
There’s just so much in the world of investing or banking where like if one or two really good rules of thumb could be imprinted on them or just one or two key definitions that’ll help them sort out a lot of other concepts when they get older or more involved in those subjects, they’ll be so ahead of the game, stuff that was otherwise passed down within a family, or you know, someone who knows these things, and when you don’t know those things, you don’t know how to ask for them. You don’t know how to articulate that need or say, “Hey, does this financial instrument exist?” Who’s left to pick up that slack? Salespeople, influencers, right? People on the internet trying to get a buck from you, right? They say, “Oh, I can help you get rich, but you have to give me your money first.” Somehow that, that scam has not gone away yet.
Steve Thomas: But teaching those digital literacy skills can be important too, because there probably are good ways to learn that kind of stuff online too, if they know the right places to go, like to go to John Green, the Crash Course kind of stuff like that, or maybe there’s probably a good TikTok out there that explains compound interest. I don’t know, but how do they identify that know that that’s what this actually means, so they have to be able to learn those skills as well.
Thomas Maluck: And let me add on top of that part of I didn’t get into the CFE I course until I had read 100 personal finance books through our library’s nonfiction collection, and now that’s over 200. It’s partly because the world of publishing and finance can be a bit of a minefield. What’s the most popular personal finance book in America? Rich Dad, Poor Dad. What does Rich Dad, Poor Dad advise you to do? Some illegal things!
So being able to put on book lists on our library’s website and say, not just because “Oh Thomas read this and he likes it,” but to be able to say “Well, here’s 10 books on this topic, and someone has read and vetted the information in them, and they’re recent, and we have diverse authors, diverse perspectives, so it’s not just like the same three or four gurus in that publishing space, but we can get a variety of voices, because it takes a lot of different hooks to get everybody in on this one giant sprawling machine that is finance, and especially finance in America, right? And it takes a lot of partnerships, and that’s where someone like Sylvie is a superhero.
Sylvie Golod: I kind of want to piggyback, you know, when you asked me earlier, how did our services expand, or how did we get to where we are? And as a career development facilitator or career coach, while we’re helping someone, it was something that came out of our coaching that I realized, for example, I created a class, “How to Find the Work You Love.” Well, there’s a component in there, yeah, it’s career, but there’s seven areas that there’s career, family, financial was the third component for personal development, physical, social, and spiritual. And I would always mention that in a holistic way, because as a career development facilitator, I had to stay in my lane, but what I realized and what I talked about with my colleagues as we were progressing and expanding our services is how important the financial component was and how we needed to address it. Because when you go, as you know, when you look for employment, you have to really reflect and sit down and figure out where are you with your finances? What type of employment are you seeking?
But where have you been with your finances? Where are you now? And then, you know, you need to look, where do you want to go? And we even say that for employment. What’s your vision for a career? Where were you, where are you now, where would you like to go? And what we started seeing is synergistically those two areas, business and careers, there was so much overlap and so much commonality in them. In fact, our model that we have, we call it the career process model, where we teach discover, define, present, promote. The first one we talk about is discover you’re the CEO of you. You’re running your own business, and just like when you run your own business, if you don’t understand your finances and you haven’t reflected on them, then you can’t probably go after a job or find employment that could maybe move you forward.
I’ll give an example. There came a time in my life where I had to readjust where I was in a career. And it was based on, I had to get in a different industry. Sometimes you have to take a step back to go forward. But in order to do that, I had to understand financially, what was my baseline?
In other words, what’s the least amount of salary I wasn’t going for the money. I was going for a transition going into a new industry. So therefore, understanding what my financial situation was helped me understand, yes, I can go into, let’s say, this education field where I’m going to have a cut in salary, but I’m going to have benefits. I’ll have more time and flexibility with my family, but I have opened up an avenue to grow into a different industry. And then within five years, can I double or triple my salary then?
That’s when we started calling upon people, not only like Thomas, but our partners to come in and talk to our patrons who were coming in to get career services, you know, what is your credit score? How do you create a budget? How do you go about negotiating a salary? Those kinds of things came out of all of that.
Steve Thomas: Well, how do you go about assessing the needs of your community to know what it is that you need to be offering?
Sylvie Golod: Well, and I’m sure Thomas offers this too. After every program, we have an evaluation. We want feedback. And the greatest feedback we can get is when people come in and they go, “When are you going to have this class again?” Or I’ll never forget when we first started this financial literacy and we would have somebody come in and speak about budgeting and your credit score, and even when Thomas was talking about scams looking for employment and there’s scams out there for employment and those kinds of things and, and of course, they would talk about that and how to handle credit cards and that kind of thing. We would notice that an hour workshop, they wouldn’t let the presenter leave, they would still be there, and this would be on a Saturday, we’d say, “You know, he has a family, he needs to go home!” You can feel the need and hear the questions while you’re there, because we’re always there with our programming that, that spoke volumes to us. So that’s based, that’s really what we do. We really, really evaluate and listen closely to our customers that attend our programs.
Thomas Maluck: And within the first program Sylvie and I did, I used a kind of like a buffet menu approach. Here are 10 different topics like little headings and subheadings and I had in addition to a pre survey everyone filled out. Like, here’s my confidence in these different financial topics. Here’s what I’m here for today. I also have them go over that menu and I said, “Mark the top 3 things you want to hear about today, and that way, it was kind of a mixture. Everyone was in a different direction, but where the Venn diagram overlapped, I was like, okay, I know I can start on this topic, and then we’ll see where we go from there.
And what Sylvie said about with scams, I have found that speakers who come in and give accurate, correct definitions of financial concepts, that is a good and useful thing. It’s also plain wonder bread and people get those definitions and they go, thank you for that. I don’t know what to do with that information. And then someone else can come in and say, okay, I’m going to give you these, this correct knowledge. I’m going to give you some sensible advice on what to do with that based on your situation. And that is also good. And then it’s also useful, but then people like to feel like they’re getting an advantage or an edge in this world, right?
So they hear the sensible advice and go, well, the sensible advice is for suckers. I want, I want the winner’s advice. I want to become a millionaire tomorrow. We can’t make anyone a millionaire tomorrow. That’s not going to happen. And the people who say they can are making a million off people who want to make a million.
Steve Thomas: Unless you listen to my new podcast, “Become a Millionaire Tomorrow By Subscribing To My Podcast!”
Thomas Maluck: It’s a one episode series, it costs 50, 000 to download.
Sylvie Golod: You know, it’s that microwave mentality, instantaneous, and that kind of thing and that’s when we start to realize and we have to educate people that just like for understanding how to go about looking for employment, it’s a process. It doesn’t happen overnight and included in that process is looking at your finances, that financial literacy component. And there’s a lot of work up front that a lot of people and rightly so, because there’s some people, you know, anxiety’ll take over. “I need a job. I need it, like, yesterday!” And that’s fine, but what we try to do, just like with a financial plan is have them look at all the components. Yes, okay, we will try to get you a job right away, but if you’re going to go through all of this, you’re going to have the resume and you’re going to go out and put yourself out there, then what does the future hold? What’s the next step we can get you to? And then, because again, the ultimate goal is financial stability, which a job can give you, that’s where the overlap, the finances, it just works so well together.
Thomas Maluck: Professional and financial education, they definitely have that intimidation factor in common. So like Sylvie said, somebody’s writing their first resume or it’s been a long time since they’ve updated it and they may feel like, “Oh, there’s some secret passcode, some secret piece of formatting that’s going to tell the hiring manager between a good hire and a bad hire, and if I don’t know that difference, I should go pay someone else to build it for me.” And it’s like, no, you can go make an appointment with Sylvie and she’ll go through the components and she’ll personalize it to your professional experience, and you will have the secret passcode for a successful resume.
Similarly in financial services, I’ve had friends who they had brokerage accounts, they opened the Roth IRA to build their tax-free savings, nest egg for the future, and they never invested anything in it. Why not? They weren’t intimidated by investing itself on the brokerage website. They literally could not find the button to click on to actually go buy whatever mutual fund, whatever stock, whatever bond they may have had in mind and it was just too intimidating to them and they thought well if I can’t find it then I guess I would have to call in and then I’d have to make an appointment and the money’s in the account so I’m just going to put it off until later and that interaction never happens until someone comes along and says “Oh you can type this in here and you click on this and you click on this and then you’re set!”
Steve Thomas: Thomas, you’re the co-chair of the Financial Literacy Employee Resource Group. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Thomas Maluck: Richland Library has a number of ERGs, or Employee Resource Groups, and these are affinity groups that can be clustered by identity or by different causes and one that I offered to start up along with a coworker, because we have co-chairs of all these ERGs, is the Financial Literacy Employee Resource Group. Part of what motivated me to get into personal finance as much as I have was, here’s the comic book lore behind me, is we had a departmental meeting where we had an icebreaker activity about the value of money and can money buy happiness and there was a split and there was some debate, some interesting tit for tat, and somebody brought up, “Oh, well, as librarians with Richland County and in South Carolina, we have access to not only a 401(k), but a 403(b) and a 457(b).” And Steve, I know you’re down in Georgia, I’m not sure which account options are available to you, but I hope you’re taking advantage of everything you can and telling your coworkers all about those kinds of benefits. But this coworker was talking about these programs, and everyone had a “deer in the headlights” expression. That was an eye-opening moment for me where I was like, wait, I only barely know about this stuff. I assumed everyone else here was a responsible adult. I was like, someone here needs to get a handle on this topic and really start spreading the word, and it can’t just be, “Oh, we’ll get the state benefits representative to come out,” or “We’ll get a banker to come out.” It’s like, no, we need to know this for ourselves so that we can explain it in plain English and look over a coworker’s shoulder when they’re saying, like, how do I enroll in this?
And I say that with all of the disclaimers that come with it. I don’t give anyone legally binding financial advice or anything like that. I’m not here to pressure anyone into anything. I don’t make a commission. None of that matters to me, but it does matter to me that my coworkers throughout the library system and their families, that they retire comfortably. When they stick around and do this good work for years and years and years, I want them to be able to reward themselves and to not look back 20, 30 years from now and say, “Oh, if I had started this account, I would have this nest egg saved up!” It’s like, well, you can start that now with 10 bucks and that can be a thing that happens. You don’t have to be a millionaire. You don’t have to be well connected. You just have to be connected to your library.
Steve Thomas: So we’ve talked a lot about the programming that you all offer. Can you talk about some of the other resources in your collection or spaces you’ve got or materials that are available for your customers?
Sylvie Golod: Well, I can speak as far as Business and Careers Services. I’m going to mention, because it was published with American Library Association, we have a Libraries Build Business Playbook and Diane Luccy, our manager, contributed to this, and there’s just a whole plethora of resources listed in that. You could get on the ALA website and there’s the Libraries Build Business Playbook as far as that goes.
And of course, as far as our career services, we had have partnerships with nonprofits, for instance, Goodwill. They have partnered with us in the past. We also do a lot of work with Midlands Technical College, SC Works, the agency there.
One of the exciting programs that I do want to mention that we did back in 2017 is with an organization called Together SC, they help 800 plus nonprofits in the state of South Carolina, and we had the vice president come out and speak on how to start a nonprofit. I remember being in the program in 2017, and then we just did it last month. So many things have changed, but again, there’s a component in there about finances and business plans. And he spoke more about that in this past particular program than he did in 2017. So it’s become even more necessary, even for those that are thinking of starting a nonprofit.
As Thomas mentioned, we have our resource groups, but we’re able to share internally and help uplift our staff with other areas of interest other than in their quote day jobs that they’re doing here with what we learn in these different programs.
Thomas Maluck: Yeah, on the resources front, we do have a subscription as a library to Morningstar Investment Research Center, which is full of really good articles. They recently removed their Portfolio X Ray tool, which I thought was a fantastic and powerful tool. Pro tip, my librarian friends TD Bank has that same Portfolio X Ray tool available for free on their website should anyone need to access it on the fly. We have a subscription to LinkedIn learning, which has a lot of different video courses with countless experts who have lots of visual and audio resources for learners. We’ve previously been subscribed to Udemy, and I know where that that may be sort of a thing that we might be into going forward but I’ve looked at a lot of the different personal finance courses that are offered on these sites, especially because and this is also true in the world of personal finance publishing: a lot of it is reinventing the wheel and trying to put some sort of spin or category on the same sensible financial advice 1000 times over where it’s like, “Oh, this book came out in 2023, but what’s the hot new financial advice for 2024?” And it’s like, you can only change so many little details or update your charts until you’re just kind of publishing the same book again.
So I would advise any librarians out there who are hearing about like, “Oh, I couldn’t do a financial literacy program. I’m not a banker. I don’t have this certification.” Look at resources. Look at who’s putting good information out there, whether it’s Clark.com, you know, the Clark Howard media personality, he puts out a lot of good vetted information or Next Gen Personal Finance, where you can create a free login and find a lot of their educational tools on there, lots of PDFs and presentations that you can use for free, especially for educators. They really hook you up quickly and then take that information and customize it to your community. So if you want to use it for teens, then say, “Okay, let’s talk about how you’re going to pay for college or your first car or your first apartment or where does the money from your paycheck go and how much should you save?” If you have a more elderly or retired or FIRE, the financial independence retire early, community, then tailor it toward them or even leave out that topic menu or suggestion box and say, “Hey, next month. We’re gonna be looking at doing these kinds of programs. Tell us now what you want to dig into and we’ll have information ready for you.”
Steve Thomas: That’s great. So what kind of advice would you give to librarians or library administrators who are interested in digging deeper into financial literacy programs in their own communities?
Thomas Maluck: I’m going to let Sylvie start because you mentioned communities and she’s all about communities.
Sylvie Golod: Well, it’s piggybacking on what Thomas said, and this is what I do a lot of, I look and see who’s out there offering the services or the resources, and then I personally get in touch with them. Also, every month, we have a community partners meeting that we actually started during the pandemic where nonprofits and agencies and businesses get together, and we share information and resources. So we pull from there a lot. For example, I mentioned that the city of Columbia, so obviously they’re one of the partners that’re on there. I just find out what the needs are, and then I go looking for a subject matter expert and then personally go and extend an invitation to them.
Everyone who we bring into the library to offer a program because the first and foremost thing that we’re looking for is what that they’re the educational component to helping our customers in whatever the subject matter is and in this case it’s financial literacy, they’re not there to promote their own business or their own bank or things like that. They’re there to provide an educational opportunity and as Thomas mentioned, we want them to come in and they come in with a lot of questions and hopefully leave with more than half of those questions answered and feel empowered.
Another example I’d like to give on the business side, when you’re talking about how do we find people, one of the people that we are partnering again with, Tom Ledbetter, who used to be at Midlands Technical College, he’s since retired and I always say that he didn’t retire. He refired. That’s my word, because I don’t think people retire much anymore; they refire and this gentleman has done that. I don’t know if you know this, but the state of South Carolina is number four for female entrepreneurs, female starting their own business. So number four, yay. We’re on top of the list for that. So, again, what we’ve got is a series that was very popular pre pandemic is Fast Track for Female Entrepreneurs, and Diane, our manager, just immediately picked up the phone, contacted the gentleman I mentioned, Tom Ledbetter and said “This is what we want to do.” They put their heads together and it’s an 8 week opportunity that is a series created by the Kaufman Foundation. And after 8 weeks of going through these sessions and each session having a subject matter expert on what is supposed to be covered in each of those weeks, they will have a certification, if you will, of completion and hopefully either start their business or enhance the business that they already have. That’s a really, really good example of plugging in to the partners that we’ve developed and then let those partners then reach out to who they know and pull them in.
Thomas Maluck: I guess my advice comes more from, to complement some of what Sylvia has just talked about, within a financial literacy program itself, the more you can make it interactive, the more you’re having a personal conversation with people within their comfort zone, of course, because money is super personal and until someone’s actually engaged someone to talk about money before, they may feel like they’re the only person who doesn’t know a certain thing. It turns out a lot of us don’t know a lot of things about finance because why in the world would you get together and learn all these terms and how to effectively manage this money? Again that feeling of enabling people whether it’s “Oh, I’m giving you an edge over these people who want to rip you off.” So it’s not just “Oh, we’re learning this for your own good because it’s vegetables, but it turns out someone else is trying to feed you trash. So you’re, you’re also not getting a negative in addition to the positive you’re getting.” Being able to relate to the audience, not speaking over their heads, not trying to guilt trip anyone, not trying to make any one demographic sound better or worse, I mean, I come from a place of, I can tell them I’ve been broke as a joke before, all right, I’ve had a car break down and when we got it to the mechanic, they quoted a price that I didn’t have in my checking account. So I’ve been there and I’ve survived on two dollars a day where I’m like, “Thank goodness for dollar menus!”
When it comes to team programming, I have this theory of the triad of, well, it can be fun and or creative and or professional. So when you’re on that professional level, I find that you’re halfway marketing to parents as much as to teens because they’re the ones who are going to notice that piece of marketing and go, “Hey, I’m going to give y’all a ride to the library and you’re going to go to this thing and then you’re going to tell me what you learned.” Sometimes parents do like to sit in on it and see what their kids are being taught. But it’s always gratifying when we get to ” Here’s how to not get ripped off on your first car loan.” And the parents are in the back, like nodding their heads really hard, like “You better listen to this! You better take notes on this!”
Sylvie Golod: Yeah, and that makes me think about the first financial subject matter expert that we had come in when we started with the financial literacy programs. The gentleman I was telling you about where people wouldn’t let him leave after he finished his program on a Saturday. He gave an example again, just like Thomas did, of how he was totally broke, maxed out his credit cards, and what he did is he reached in his pocket, pulled out his credit card, and he had written something on his credit card, like a label maker, he had put on there something that spurred him to remind him “You can go broke. Is this a need or is this a want?” I think is what he had on there: “Is this a need or is this a want?” Well, everybody just latched on to it, and to Thomas’s point, it was funny because these programs were directed to adults, but I can’t tell you how many adults brought their children in, and when I say children, young adults with them and they were learning together.
Thomas Maluck: And in promoting stuff to the community, finding common ground where everyone feels like this is not only helpful and educational, I have a next step, or I know somebody, like, this is the next step that I can understand why this would be useful to use as opposed to perhaps “Text the word Patriot to nine, eight, nine, eight, nine, eight and protect your wealth from the deep state by opening a gold IRA!” We’re not going to do that.
Sylvie Golod: Yeah, and just like in career development, when people come in for career coaching, like I said, we always want them to come in, maybe a lot of times they come in feeling not so great, but we want them to leave feeling rather empowered. When I was doing research to get together with both of you today. And reviewing the commonalities, what resonated with me with the financial literacy is that the goal is to have a sense of empowerment, promotes long term success, and enhances overall well-being, and I just was like blown away again because those three, because that was given as a reason why financial literacy is so important, but then it’s so important as well within the career development realm.
Steve Thomas: So I’m going to wrap up with a quick Secret Stacks crossover and ask Thomas if he has any comics or graphic novel recommendations that cover financial literacy.
Thomas Maluck: I do have my Goodreads open. You’re going to have to give me just a few seconds to get my recommendations in place.
Steve Thomas: I do remember at one point someone did a graphic novel version of the iTunes Terms of Service.
Thomas Maluck: They did.
Steve Thomas: See, I’m putting him on the spot, but he’s got it ready, so he just has to go find the resource. That’s a good librarian right there.
Sylvie Golod: Well, while he’s doing that, in my arena, I did write down a book that resonated with me that had a financial literacy component in it, and it’s called The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly, and the thing that resonated with me was the fact that there was actually someone, this was a hypothetical situation, but implemented across the country when people after reading the book is they actually had someone who was the Dream Manager within this company, and one of the components was helping people reach their dreams and the component was with financial literacy. So that is a good book that I would recommend.
Thomas Maluck: All right, so I have a pair of titles that I think would serve anyone well dipping their toe in personal finance. The first one on the more graphic front is called “How To Money Your Ultimate Visual Guide to the Basics of Finance,” and that’s by Jean Chatzky and Kathryn Tuggle with illustrator Nina Cosford. That’s full of different, not just charts and definitions, but also lots of visual guides that do help break down a lot of concepts in personal finance.
And the other one, this is a little bit of a cheat, but it’s called “The Index Card, Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated” by Helaine Olen and Harold Pollack. It came from an online exercise that went viral where Mr. Pollack said, “You know, you can probably fit everything that anyone needs to know about personal finance in about nine or ten rules on an index card.” And so he wrote one out, he took a photo of it, he put it online, it went viral. And then some people said, “Well, can you flesh out some of these ideas just to explain it?” So he wrote this book, The Index Card with Helaine Olen. I think as a visual piece to be able to say, and the book comes with the index card. Boom, here you go, here’s just 10 bullet points. You’re set, more or less, like if you do these 10 things, the little details are just noise after that.
Steve Thomas: But if you check it out from the library, please don’t write on the index card that it comes with it.
Thomas Maluck: It’s a valuable card. Please don’t ruin it.
Steve Thomas: Thomas and Sylvie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. As you said earlier, that is very timely to have it on in Financial Literacy Month, and I think it is a great important thing that libraries need to be focusing on in any kind of economy.
Thank you both for coming on and thank you for all the valuable advice.
Sylvie Golod: Thanks for having us.
Thomas Maluck: Yeah. This was a good time.
Steve Thomas: Bye.
Sylvie Golod: Bye.
Circulating Ideas 