Center for Financial Wellness promotes financial literacy, planning tips

KYLIA BERRY Staff Writer

Planning out your financial and educational decisions can be overwhelming. While you are still determining your financial stability, the Center for Financial Wellness strives to educate students about financial decisions so that they will be able to achieve their goals.

The CFW offers students access to financial aid tools and calculators to better foresee their financial standing.

“We recognize that every student is in a different place in their financial wellness and, therefore, needs different types of support and information,” Philippa Satterwhite, coordinator for financial wellness and education in the Center for Financial Wellness, said.

Your financial decisions are critical for a successful and stress-free college experience.

Aliah Mahalati, a junior majoring in political science and theater, went to a CFW seminar and believes the information she learned to be valuable.

“I think that the information and recommendations that they gave us were definitely helpful, and although it was information I already knew and was practicing, I believe it could make a huge difference for a new student trying to navigate finances for the first time,” Mahalati said.

The CFW understands the difficulty of navigating through the finances that college students encounter.

“The financial aid process can be very complicated for a first-time student, but we work hard at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to provide as many resources as possible to assist them,” Satterwhite said.

One of the resources provided by the CFW is CashCourse which helps to inform students about their financial decisions. The CashCourse website acknowledges the importance of financial literacy in the 21st century. The website offers a self-guided interactive website to help students budget, review terms of student loans and good credit and recognize theft and scams the students may face. Students can create a free account using their UT email address.

“CashCourse provides all students at UT the opportunity to take a self-guided course on the topics they would like to know more about and can learn at a time that is most convenient to them,” Satterwhite said.

Students are provided with a net price and loan calculator to shed light on financial success. The net price calculator estimates your financial aid and out-of-pocket costs based on the information you enter about yourself and your family. The loan calculator helps families identify the best loan for their academic goals. The CFW team is committed to providing the next and most adequate financial plan to support you and your family.

“The calculators on the Center for Financial Wellness website are meant to help students better understand how much they are borrowing and how long it will take to repay their loans,” Satterwhite said.

The Center offers an interactive spending plan to identify your sources of income and expenses throughout your education. Spending plans help identify our patterns of costs and differentiate between our needs and wants. The program allows students to manage their finances and spend according to their budget effectively.

The CFW also has a list of unfamiliar termsto help search for financial aid information with CFW’s financial tools. The center has broken down the words to assist you with your financial success. Understanding these terms will allow students to make well-informed financial decisions.

The University of Tennessee strives to provide 85% of undergraduates with financial aid and scholarships. In the center, students can evaluate their eligibility for different scholarship types.

“A mission of the Center for Financial Well- ness is to provide our campus and community with resources to educate and guide them when navigating financial decision-making by gaining financial literacy knowledge and money management skills, to encourage productive lifelong financial habits and practices and to advocate for a broader campus-wide culture of financial literacy and wellness,” Satterwhite said.

Philippa Satterwhite, coordinator of financial wellness and education, welcomes students to the Cones and Loans event in Hodges Library on April 25. Ericksen Gomez-Villeda / The Daily Beacon