Fourth-grade classes from Alice Byrne Elementary School had the opportunity on Monday to tour Mohave State Bank — including the inside of the vault.
Students learned about the importance of saving money for unexpected expenses during their field trip and also about other real-life fiscal responsibilities like the difference between wants and needs.
After teaching the students about financial literacy for two weeks in the classroom, Mohave State Bank Business Relationship Manager Jeff Byrd, gave the students real-life examples of how they can save money to further drive his point home.
“I wish a financial literacy program was available when I was growing up. Like most people, I had to learn about how to handle finances through hard experience. At Mohave State Bank, we're working toward helping to equip the next generation with good financial management tools and knowledge,” said Byrd.
Students from Alice Byrne as well as Roosevelt and Gwyneth Ham elementary schools participate in the program in conjunction with “Teach Children to Save Day” held nationally on April 24. The program is sponsored by the American Bankers Association Education Foundation.
Fourth-grade teacher Chris Jones emphasized that a major issue that kids deal with in fourth-grade is needs versus wants. Through these classes they learn to prioritize their spending, she said.
“Parents know what their budget is and kids have to realize that they can't always get everything they want at the store... The kids now have a little more of a connection with the real world and why their parents say ‘no' to buying things sometimes,” Jones said.
She added that this program helps the students make a connection between math and the real world.
“We talk a lot about going to college and how if they start at this point they could have money for a college education if that's something they want,” she said.
William Duncan, 9, started a savings account after his sister went through the program last year and he said that he has already saved up over $100 from his allowance.
“I just started out with only $5 in there,” he said.
He said that he plans to continue to put money in that account so that he can save up to pay for college tuition. “I want to be an engineer,” Duncan explained.
Jaylyn Ray, 10, said that she enjoyed learning about how she can start saving money.
“It's important to save money because then you can buy the things that you need,” she commented. “When you grow up you can use the money to help your family and give to charity.”
Ellyana Garcia, 10, said that her favorite part of the field trip was being able to hold $10,000 cash in her hands.
“It felt good to hold that much money,” she said.
Garcia added that she learned that they don't just keep money at the bank though, they also hold important documents and valuables in safe deposit boxes.
She said she plans to open up a savings account to save money for special events and other things she may need.
Fellow classmate Victoria Sanchez, 9, said that she also had a chance to hold $10,000 and she was surprised at how light it felt.
She said her favorite part though, was being able to enter into the vault and to see what was in there.
Sanchez added, “It's important to save so you can have money to get food and water and everything.”
Byrd concluded that the students have the opportunity to open up a free banking account through the program.
He said that the requirements are that the student puts in $5 to open the account and that one guardian accompanies the child to the bank in order to place their name on the account. They are also required to deposit $1 or more every three months to keep the account open and to get them in the habit of saving money.
For more information, parents and students can contact Byrd at 344-8822.
Visit www.abaef.com for more information about “Teach Children to Save Day.”
Sarah Womer can be reached at swomer@yumasun.com or 539-6858. Find her on Facebook at Facebook.com/YSSarahWomer or on Twitter at @YSSarahWomer.
EU finance ministers haggle over bank rules - Yahoo Finance
BRUSSELS (AP) -- European Union finance ministers are to meet in in Brussels Tuesday to hammer out an agreement over how high banks should build their defenses against future financial shocks, with the U.K. running the risk of being isolated over who should set the height.
The EU's 27 members agree on the need to increase capital reserves of banks, following an international agreement called Basel III, which was negotiated by the world's largest economies to avoid another financial meltdown such as the one brought on by the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008.
But the U.K. wants national regulators to be able to set requirements significantly higher than those of the EU — a position opposed by almost all other EU members, who fear investors might then prefer UK banks and flee from those in other countries.
On his way into the meeting Tuesday morning, George Osborne, the British chancellor of the exchequer, was non-committal about the possibility of reaching an agreement.
"This is a time of considerable uncertainty in the eurozone economies," he said, referring to the 17 countries — the U.K. not among them — that use the euro currency. "And that uncertainty is undermining the entire European recovery. And I think we're reaching a point where we've got to make a decision to see the eurozone stand behind their currency. A very important part of that, of course, is strengthening the entire European banking system. And that is what we intend to do today."
Once enacted, Basel III would require lenders to increase their highest-quality capital — such as equity and cash reserves — gradually from 2 percent of the risky assets they hold to 7 percent by 2019. An additional 2.5 percent would have to be built up during good times. All members of the G-20 have agreed to implement Basel III; if the European Union succeeds, it would become the first entity to institute the new requirements.
The U.K. is arguing that, because national taxpayers have to bail out banks when they fail, national authorities should be able to set more stringent requirements to guard against such failures. A compromise proposal offered by the Danes, who hold the rotating presidency of the European Union, would allow national authorities some leeway to increase requirements beyond those called for in the Basel III agreement. That proposal has broad support — except, so far, from the U.K.
The finance ministers can approve the compromise proposal without British support, through what is known as qualified majority voting, in which member countries have different numbers of votes according to their populations. However, there is a tradition in the EU that changes that would affect an industry in a particular country — such as the banking sector in the U.K. — are not forced into effect over the objections of that country, and consensus is sought.
"I think there should be a unanimous decision on such an important issue," Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg said on his way into the meeting.
Champions League exclusion costs Spurs - Football
Published: 21 May 2012 - 16:47:06
Tottenham's exclusion from the Champions League due to Chelsea's triumph in the tournament will cost Spurs up to £35million in cash - but the real damage could be far greater in terms of keeping their stars, say football finance experts.
Brendan Guilfoyle, a football expert at P&A Partnership, said the headache for Spurs will not just be about balancing the books.
"In terms of the effect financially, Spurs is a well-run club but revenues will inevitably be lower so they will have to adjust that in terms of the wages they can offer and the transfer fees they can pay and still remain in the black," he said.
"The perhaps more immediate worry for fans, and I am a Tottenham fan myself, is that in terms of signing top players we won't be as attractive as we cannot promise the highest level of club football any more.
"There is also the worry that some of those star players, having tasted the Champions League already, will want to do so again and look to move elsewhere."
Spurs finished fourth in the Barclays Premier League, which would normally guarantee a place in the qualifying rounds of the Champions League, but they lose out because Chelsea take that fourth English place as European title holders.
Tottenham will earn only around £5m in media rights from the Europa League instead of a guaranteed £25m from the Champions League. There is also a significant loss in associated matchday, merchandise and sponsorship income that could see a further cost to the club of around £10million.
Even more concerning for fans is the possibility of star players such as Luka Modric and Gareth Bale pushing for a move to clubs that are in the Champions League next season.
Spurs fans have reacted furiously to missing out on Europe's elite club tournament but UEFA say their competition rules, brought in after Liverpool won the competition but finished outside the top four in the Premier League, are clear.
Tottenham earned 31.1m euros (£25.1m) in TV money and bonuses from their 2010/11 season in the Champions League. An English club making the Europa League quarter-finals earns a total of 6m euros (£5m).
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Money, not technology, drives cloud growth, IT shrinkage - IT World
May 22, 2012, 12:00 AM — Cloud computing may be the biggest thing ever to hit IT, but not for good solid technical reasons, and not because it gives IT the chance to show it really does know what their companies really need from technology to make the business shine.
Unfortunately, it's finance, not technology driving the market for and implementations of cloud. It is also business units, not IT, that is driving adoption of cloud and the drastic changes to which IT is more observer than driving force.
IT economic expert Howard Rubin writes that both consumerization and cloud computing recently hit periods of rocket-powered growth due to "Jevon's Paradox:" " Technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource."
The success of Salesforce and Gmail bred Microsoft's Office 365, Evernote, Dropbox, a thousand other SaaS providers as well as the launch of cloud-based rent-a-data-center services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Azure, cloud-based platform services from Rackspace, TerreMark, 3Tera and other companies with years of experience offering high-quality co-location, hosting or outsourcing services that expanded their businesses by offering cloud as well.
Only 20 percent of businesses have completed any significant cloud migrations, according to a Symantec study of 5,300 IT executives that was released in October.
A February, 2012 survey of 100 corporate financial decision-makers found 68 percent of large companies are already building out some form of cloud-computing capability, whether that meant SaaS services from outside or adding cloud-based IT management capabilities in-house.
Not only has cloud changed the economics of IT, it has changed both the culture and the politics.
The positive shift in cost/benefit ratio of a service the company can add or drop at will without having to buy or maintain the servers to run it made CFOs the biggest fans of external cloud offerings such as SaaS, , according to Forrester analyst James Staten.
Not only do cloud services come with lower upfront capital and operational costs, they make it easier for CFOs to put a dollar value on IT functions for which they had no valid comparisons when the only option other than having IT build something was to outsource the whole project to India.
That change has turned every technology conversation in IT into one about the effective management of IT budgets, opportunity costs and comparisons of the cost/benefit of external services versus control over data and security systems, according to Forrester's Thomas Mendel, who predicted in 2010 how drastically the availability and economics of cloud would change the financial analysis of IT.
Cloud computing took off so quickly IT didn't have the chance to adjust: IT economic expert Howard Rubin writes that both consumerization and cloud computing recently hit periods of rocket-powered growth due to "Jevon's Paradox: " Technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource." (i.e. No good deed goes unpunished.)
Increasingly, CFOs are making the technology decisions on their own as well. Last year CFOs, – not CIOs – made 26 percent of IT investment decisions by themselves and collaborating with CIOs on a total of 51 percent of IT decisions, according to a June, 2011 study by Gartner and Financial Executives International (FEI).
Almost half of CIOs now report to CFOs than to the CEO, according to a Forrester study.
Of those who responded, 93 percent of CFOs said cloud computing would play important roles in corporate strategies during the next 18 months.
According to Symantec's (unrelated) study of senior-level IT people involved in cloud, as many as 19 percent said their companies have considered launching a cloud project, but have done nothing about it. Twenty- to twenty-five percent aren't even thinking about it. Only 34 percent are in trials or active implementation.
If that sounds like a big gap between the CFOS' perceptions of how cloudy most companies are becoming and IT's, it is.
IT has already lost the silver lining on this cloud
The biggest change cloud computing has brought to the relationship between IT and end users is the ability of end users to buy their own IT with no help from geeks.
So the low percentage of IT people who told Symantec their companies don't have much going on with cloud almost certainly represent the segment of IT being bypassed by aggressive business units who contract with SaaS or cloud platform vendors directly, leaving IT to sit quietly and play with its orderly collection of toys that no one wants to play with any more.
At least, that's the more charitable interpretation. The one that came out of studies that showed the same results a year ago, seasoned with 12 months worth of user frustration at IT departments too afraid of cloud to do anything useful about it.
The shift in business-unit-managers' minds toward cloud and refusal of IT to keep pace is changing more than just the organizational structure and budget of IT, according to IDC analyst Joseph Pucciarelli.
Not only has the cloud changed the relationship between business units and IT, failing to deal with it promptly has knocked many CIOs out of their relatively new position within the inner circles of executive management.
Cloud – actually the business functions users are after when they buy cloud services – has made clear to business-unit managers that the decision of where to buy those services is too important to be left to IT to implement or deploy.
Cloud players may devour each other but the cloud will abide
Business unit managers will continue to hold the reins and will continue to drive more sales of cloud services, according to nearly every study.
Public cloud services generated $21.5 billion in 2010, but will rise at close to 28 percent per year to $72.9 billion in 2015, according to IDC.
By 2015, public clouds will take in 46 percent of all the new money spent in IT on apps, app
The result will be a merger and acquisition "feeding frenzy as these companies seek to gain a competitive edge," according to IDC's report.
That may thin out the market, but won't hurt cloud computing as a category, according to Gartner's Chris Howard.
Over a relatively short period, cloud computing will "become one of the ways we 'do' computing and workloads [apps/VMs] will move around in hybrid internal/external IT environments," he said following release of Gartner's report How internal and External Cloud Services are Transforming IT.
IDC goes even further, referring to both internal and external clouds simply as "the Third Platform."
By then, even with the extra space of a third platform, there may not be much room for IT except a couple of floors beneath the executive suite, where it can maintain the legacies, keep the lights on and try to keep out of the way of end users and cloud providers that will be setting the agendas, managing the budgets and occasionally phoning IT just to make sure it hasn't gotten too lonely.
Read more of Kevin Fogarty's CoreIT blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Kevin on Twitter at @KevinFogarty. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.
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