Essay Summary:

Financial literacy is crucial for making informed decisions about money. Lack of financial literacy in inner cities leads to poor spending habits, hindering wealth accumulation and perpetuating poverty. Educating children and adults in low-income areas is essential to break this cycle and promote financial success.

Essay Grade:

Rubric

Total Score: 11/15

Suggestions for Improvement of Structure, Grammar, Vocabulary, Content Length, and Tone

• Consider organizing the essay into clear sections with subheadings for introduction, importance of financial literacy, statistics, personal reflection, and conclusion to improve readability.
• Review and correct any grammatical errors and ensure consistent use of tense throughout the essay.
• Expand your vocabulary to include more specific financial terms and concepts to demonstrate a deeper understanding of the subject.
• While the essay meets the minimum word count, expanding on certain points, such as detailing specific financial literacy strategies, could enrich the content.
• The tone is appropriate but could be enhanced by incorporating more persuasive language to emphasize the urgency and importance of financial literacy education.

Suggestions for Topic-Related Improvements

• Include more detailed examples or case studies of financial literacy programs that have successfully impacted inner-city communities.
• Discuss potential barriers to financial literacy in these communities and propose solutions to overcome them.
• Consider how technology and digital financial tools could play a role in improving financial literacy among inner-city youth.
• Reflect more deeply on the feedback or reactions from the students during your presentation to gauge the immediate impact of your efforts.
• Explore the role of local governments, non-profits, and community organizations in promoting financial literacy and how they can collaborate with schools.

Essay:

What is Financial literacy? Financial literacy is having skills, knowledge, and experience to make good choices regarding your money. Many people in the inner city aren’t educated about effective and smart ways to spend their money. This negatively affects them because they aren’t able to achieve generational wealth and negatively affects their communities because it creates an area of poor people. People must be financially literate to be successful in life and we start that by educating the children first.
Financial literacy is important for all because it gives you the knowledge to make good choices regarding your money especially for those that live in the inner city. The inner city harbors lots of stores with products that could be appealing for consumers. Lots of people in the inner city make impulse purchases which are purchases you make in the heat of the moment. These purchases can range from a bag of chips to a new shirt. Every dollar counts when you are trying to be financially literate. Every dollar you spend can be another dollar you can invest in, put in an emergency fund, and put toward paying your bills. Many people in the inner city struggle to make ends meet because they are making bad financial decisions. If these people were financial literate it’d be a lot easier for them to pay their bills and save for the future. The inner city tends to have the most homeless people. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority there are “46,260” homeless people in the City of Los Angeles. They could have become homeless due to bad spending habits, but if they were financially literate they might have not gone homeless.
To add onto my previous statement, according to the County of Los Angeles Public Health “ 53% of adults have low literacy levels”. If adults in the inner city are barely able to read and write then we can deduce they aren’t financially literate. These adults often own homes in low income areas that most of the time stay low income because they don’t know how to spend their money. Them not being able to properly spend and save their money plays a part in communities being made where kids are raised in poverty and them not being able to achieve success in life.
The people that reside in poor communities are often minorities. According to the United States Census “48% of people are hispanic and 6.6% are African American”. Since these are the types of people who reside in low-income communities, these are the people that need to be educated about financial literacy. It’s not their fault that they aren’t financially literate. Some grew up in another country where schooling isn’t mandatory. Some just never attended school due to personal circumstances.

A way to counteract all this is to start teaching them while they are still young and your words can leave a long lasting impact. This is what I wished to accomplish when I presented to the kids. I hope I was able to teach them how to properly save money, ways to make your money grow, and what are good and bad purchases. I made an emphasis on explaining what are good and bad purchases because they like to buy fast food, expensive clothes and shoes and if they get into a habit of this now it can follow them into adulthood. I hope they were able to take away that buying expensive shoes doesn’t help you in the long term because more often than not the value of the shoes will decrease over time. I hope they start to think like that before they make an expensive purchase because it’s more important to save your money than spend it all on material objects that depreciate over time.

Financial Literacy is a very important quality to have so you can succeed later on in life. The people in low-income areas are the ones that many need to be educated because there aren’t many opportunities that are given to them. But if they are financially literate they can make good decisions with their money and still succeed in life. It’s also important to educate kids because if we expose them to this now then later on in life they will be able to make good choices.

LAHSA Releases Results of 2023 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count. www.lahsa.org/news?article=927-lahsa-releases-results-of-2023-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count.
LA County Public Health – Health Education Administration. www.publichealth.lacounty.gov/hea/HealthLiteracy.htm.

“Quick Facts.” United States Census, 1 July 2023, www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/losangelescitycalifornia/PST045222.