“Are you paying attention or not?” my husband asked, as I moved listlessly trying my best to appear interested in what he was telling me. He was talking seriously about our pension plan, and I viewed it as a complex and involved topic. Somehow I was finding it difficult to grasp the details. Financial planning was important to me, but I had never really gotten serious about it….until the day I met Cary Clark, the awesome lady who teaches Financial Literacy classes for WBG spouses. Cary has been teaching financial literacy for several years now and she does both classroom and the online courses, for spouses in DC as well as those in the country offices. There are three courses in Financial Literacy.

You begin with “Money Matters” or you jump right to the online “Family Budgeting” and if/when you feel confident enough, you go on to the online “Savings & Investments” course. Remember that you cannot do the online Savings & Investments without completing the Family Budgeting course. To me, the meeting with Cary was an eye-opener on many levels. I came home that day considering myself fortunate to have met an amazing and inspiring person.

Cary Clark—Our Financial Guru

Our conversation was lively and cheerful in tone and I never realized that such a happy lady could have had a sad story in her past. As Cary told me about her personal tragedy, of having lost her husband at an early age and feeling totally overwhelmed by the financial decisions she had to make, she also laid before me the reason for her giving financial literacy classes and said, “I never dwell in the past,” for me it is all “about the here and now.” How true - by shifting our focus to the present we get moving after a tragedy; if not, we stagnate in the past.

Cary Clark is a wonderful woman who has a knack of masking serious terminology into normal day to day phrases and easy to understand language. As I kept talking to her I realized that she made everything seem so simple; she said “everything is easy when you break things down in a doable way.” Maybe that is the hallmark of a good teacher, making her students understand that everything is easy and nothing is impossible.

Family Budgeting—Spouses have to take greater interest

Very few of us realize that financial empowerment leads to higher self-confidence and greater peace of mind. In Cary’s opinion, “Spouses should take greater interest in finances so that they are not overwhelmed at the time of crisis. When bad things happen, you do not want to be rushing to find bank account statements or certificates. When tragedy hits you, you are not in a learning mode. I realized this the hard way and I do not want the others to do the same.” Cary drew an analogy to the “reckless drivers on their scooters who do not slow down, until something happens to them.” Our attitude to personal finance is pretty much the same; we think that nothing bad is going to happen to us. But when tragedy strikes, it is mostly unannounced. Many women who still leave the financial decision-making to their spouse may end up unprepared to handle their finances if they divorce or outlive their husbands. “Taking a family budgeting class will help women realize that they need to get financially organized. It will help them maintain records, track their expenses and keep themselves out of debt. They will learn that it is better to live below your means so that you can save for future emergencies”

Savings and Investment—A financial framework is a must

Bringing up conversations about money and savings can be difficult in a marriage, but it is a necessity. Couples need to sit down and plan “their savings, their debt, their day to day expenses, and their annual expenses; they have to create a reserve fund for those expenses that they might face once or twice a year. It is nice to work with a financial framework for the family. It is beneficial to put children on a tight budget and let them know how important it is to understand that money is limited. A course in savings and investment will help spouses understand why they need to save, and how their savings grow.” It will help them determine their financial targets for retirement, evaluate their savings and understand whether the money that they are saving now will be able to buy them what they want in the future. “Do you want a nice life later or do you want it now?” is the question. “During my classes I make my students do an exercise,” she said, “I make them calculate the length of service that they need to put in an organization to be able to take home the pension that can carry them through the rest of their lives without difficulty. Most often, the numbers of years of service they need to put in to get a sizeable pension throws them off-guard. An employee needs almost 35 years of service to be able to take home approximately the amount of his salary as his pension.” No one ever said saving for the future was easy, but you need to put away some money for the future, however difficult it may be, because that is the only way you can ensure yourself a secure and care-free retirement. The key is to remember that the earlier you start planning your retirement, the better off you will be in the future.

Why not try the Financial Literacy Training Program?

We all prepare for natural disasters, for snow storms, for hurricanes and tornadoes and

other natural calamities. In today’s complex world we have learned to tackle terrorism and Wall Street meltdowns too! We live in a global world, we travel the earth, we read a lot and have extensive knowledge about many things, yet, we do very little towards ensuring our financial security. Today more than ever it is imperative for everyone to know “financial jargon, read financial newspapers, surf the internet for financial information and know how stock markets work.” As a beginning, a course in Financial Literacy Training Program, will enable you to understand financial terminology, help you research online to get more financial information; it will help you “make a portfolio and also understand which one is right for you and your family.” Each family has different financial needs at different times, and the key to good financial planning is identifying individual specific needs.

You should know your retirement plans and how they work

Take for example our pension plans—Cary asks, “How many of us know that our pension plans have changed? How many of us know that there will be a pension-gap? How many spouses know that during retirement, when their husbands die, they are eligible for only 50% of the pension amount from then on? How many of us know that in personal pension plans we are solely responsible for the investment risks that we take while making our choices? Do we realize that we now play a more active role in making pension plan decisions? Do we know that a diversification of our portfolio is the best way to secure ourselves from losing money?” “We need to shine a light on this dark area of our new pension plans—our investment choices and how they affect our pension payout. That is why we are coming up with a new online course on Pension Plans.” At the Bank, we have employees coming and going, we have open-term employees as well as short-term consultants; we have those who have put in a sizeable length of service as well as those who move from project to project. All these factors can have a significant impact on your pension payout. It is, therefore, very important for spouses to know their pension portfolio plan.

What’s in the pipeline?

As Cary went on explaining the various financial literacy courses she teaches at the WBFN, she also told me, “The nominal course fees that we charge covers the course materials distributed during the course.” She added, “The online courses are highly reasonable too.” We are coming up with two new online courses—one on pension plans and the other on time management. I think that the course on pension plan will be really useful since it is essential for everyone to understand their pension plan. As for the time management course, I think to be successful it is essential to prioritize what you want to do and when. Time management also governs how much you get done, and helps increase our productivity. Hopefully we will be able to pilot run these courses during spring.”

Effective online courses

When I asked Cary about her online courses, she said, “Right now, in conjunction with The World Bank Institute, WBFN offers two online courses on personal finance—“Family Budgeting” and “Savings & Investments”. These courses can be taken by spouses both in DC and at country offices. Spouses’ sign up for these classes. Students in Washington who do not have access to a personal computer, have the option of using WBFN computers for their classes. The e-learning courses are 5 weeks in duration; we teach five units, a unit each week, that you can learn at your own pace. The previous online courses have been very successful; by the third week, students are very comfortable discussing and interacting with each other. Our facilitators make sure that students come back regularly to learn and participate; the facilitators email, mail and call absentee students.” Cary also mentioned, “We judge how successful the courses have been by counting how many have completed the course. About 85% of our students always complete their course successfully, and carry home a certificate of completion given to them by WBFN. Also, I have little polls after each unit that students can take. This helps me judge how much my students are benefiting from my courses.”

Cary’s classes—Useful, informative and popular

As part of my interview with Cary I went to attend her class for just half an hour. When I went in, Cary was asking her students to enumerate what they had learned that day. The students responded immediately and enthusiastically and there was no repetition of answers. It was amazing to see an entire class energetically finishing off their session. Just like the other students in her class, I got myself a chocolate at the end of the class but, however, I was ignorant of the financial knowledge that they now possessed. As I realized this, a sense of disappointment immediately engulfed me. I made up my mind to sign up for a future class as I walked back. I feel if you haven’t taken a class with Cary you should do the same as me—Sign up for a Financial Literacy course!

Vidya Rangan