If you’re interested in improving your understanding of banking, your goal setting, or even your credit rating, Solid Ground’s Financial Fitness Boot Camp (FFBC) has you covered.

In the third workshop of this four-part series, participants learned about personal banking, discovering the best options for their own situations and easy ways to save money.

In the first workshop, Noel Lerner, FFBC/Tenant Counselor, walked everyone who attended through the process of building a monthly budget, and participants shared their own tips for cutting costs. In the second one, Noel taught everyone how to understand and protect their credit.

Understanding banking

Most of us are used to using banks in our everyday lives, but how many of us understand exactly how it works, or even the differences between different options? Noel keeps up with all of these details and knows how to explain them in a clear, practical way for her audience to understand.

Following her lead, participants walk through every step of the banking process that is useful in everyday life, learning everything from how to open an account to how to pay your bills and deposit checks on your phone, without ever having to walk into a bank.

This process also fits perfectly into the rest of the Boot Camp. While each session is useful on its own, they also connect in practical ways. Staying on top of your bank accounts is easy if you have a budget already set up. Managing your credit card bills is easy if you have your bank accounts set up in the best way for your own situation.

Choosing your own best option

After refreshing everyone on the differences between checking and savings account and banks and credit unions, Noel distributes a useful chart that compares many of the most practical banking options in the Seattle area. The chart makes it easy to compare everything from late fees to the price of printed checks, letting participants decide what is most important to them.

Noel also gives her recommendations based on her own experience, which many participants add to, sharing their own advice and tips. Similar to the other sessions in the Boot Camp, getting to hear real, practical advice from other participants is an incredible opportunity.

Noel also makes sure to connect all of these tips to real-life situations. As a group, the participants and Noel walk through a practice scenario, picking out the best checking account for a made-up person and coming up with tips for how they can improve their banking. While the scenario might be made up, the tips are real – and helpful!

Keeping up with your accounts

While many of the tips at the banking boot camp session focus on choosing the best option – since it’s often the easiest way to save money on banking – other parts of the session walk everyone through the process of opening an account, making deposits and withdrawals, and even tracking your balance once your account is open.

The session has something to offer for participants of any experience level, especially with constantly updated tools for tracking your account and paying your bills online, which Noel makes sure to stay on top of and explains in detail during the Boot Camp.

Together, all of these tips can help you choose the right banking options and set up and consistently stay on top of your accounts.

This summer’s Financial Fitness Boot Camp is hosted on Wednesdays from 3-5pm throughout July. The fourth talk will focus on financial goal setting.

(Note: While participants must attend all four sessions to receive a Certificate of Completion, the workshops are offered quarterly at Solid Ground, so makeup sessions may be available! Unfortunately, the current FFBC is full and we are unable to take any more participants. Registration for the October Boot Camp is open. That Boot Camp series will start October 2.)