By Beth Ziehmer
During Financial Literacy Month in April, Mapping Your Future encourages you to use its financial literacy tools and share the tools and resources with your students:
- The 12-Step Guide to Financial Success
- Website content, including the Manage your money page
- Mapping Your Future offers several student loan and money management calculators:
- Loan consolidation calculator: Allows borrowers to estimate the repayment period, interest rate, and repayment schedule if they consolidate
- Debt/salary wizard:
- Helps students and parents determine how much salary is needed to support the payments on current and future student loan debt and how much the student can borrow based on future expected earnings.
- Estimates standard repayment for student loans
- Deferment navigator: Allows borrowers to determine deferment eligibility based on when their oldest outstanding loan was disbursed
- Student loan repayment calculator: Allows borrowers to estimate payments on federal student loans, as well as determine how much salary is needed to support student loan debt
- Income-based repayment calculator: Allows borrowers to estimate monthly payment amount under the income-based repayment plan
- Refinance and weighted average interest rate calculators: Allows borrowers to determine whether refinancing is a good option by comparing monthly payments and total interest paid for current loan(s) to those amounts with a refinancing offer.
- Budget calculator: Allows students to create a monthly budget, reminding them of various expenses including transportation expenses, grocery items, and miscellaneous expenses
- Checkbook balancing tool: Enables students and families to reconcile their bank statements to their check register each month (without storing their information)
- Savings calculator: Allows students and families to see how valuable saving can be, estimating future value of an investment
- The Mapping Your Future newsletters include articles on default prevention and/or student loans and money management. You can run some of the articles in your own publications and communications for students and borrowers, while others provide you with information about new tactics and tools. Individuals can subscribe at mappingyourfuture.org/newsroom/subscribe.
Contact the Mapping Your Future staff at feedback@mappingyourfuture.org or (800) 374-4072 with any questions.
