March 10, 2010
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Michael F. Sullivan, Director of Education, Take Charge America
Michael Sullivan, aka the Budget Doctor, is Director of Education at Take Charge America, a nonprofit credit counseling and debt management agency. He is a past president of the Arizona Jump$tart Coalition, and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Take Charge America Institute at the University of Arizona. A lifelong educator, he also served as Executive Director of the Agency for Instructional Technology from 1990–2003. Under his direction, AIT established and published TECHNOS Quarterly. Before joining AIT, Mike had served as director of strategic planning and development at UNISYS Corporation and was assistant state superintendent in the Maryland Department of Education. He is a graduate of Bowling Green State University and holds a master’s degree from Wright State University and a doctorate from Virginia Tech. His many publications include contributions to Taking Charge of Your Personal Finances; articles in business journals such as Arizona Business; and educational pieces in Executive Educator, The American School Board Journal, CURRENT, and Educational Leadership. Technos spoke with Dr. Sullivan on Election Day 2008.
Technos: Tell us about your job responsibilities at Take Charge America.
M. F. S.: When you’re part of a credit counseling group, your job is to help people handle credit and debt. My background is in education, not finance, but I’ve found personal finance to be easy. Basically, we do all we can to help educate people about how to manage their money. Part of my job at Take Charge America is community outreach, so when I first started here six years ago, I did a lot of writing about financial topics and did a lot of PowerPoint presentations at local schools—that sort of thing. My articles are available on our Web site.
Of course, in recent years, the economy has slowed a lot and people have been losing jobs, so we’ve had a lot more requests from area employers for presentations. Those activities, the “lunch & learn” sessions in workplaces, comprise about 90 percent of our work. I also run the training department here, and I’m responsible for the online educational content. In fact, we partnered with AIT a while back to produce 50 lesson plans that are available at our Web site. And I’m very involved with the Family Economics and Financial Education (FEFE) program we’re doing with the University of Arizona. The FEFE curriculum was developed for high school educators. We provide them with no-cost curriculum materials and the skills to teach family economics and finance to their students.
How much outreach do you do in schools?
Not much anymore. For one thing, while there are National Standards in K–12 Personal Finance Education, there are only nine states that require testing on personal finance, so this stuff isn’t taught much. It’s too bad, because students are amazingly ignorant about budgeting, credit cards, and debt management. I’ve found they don’t master these things on their own, and I think it couldn’t hurt to teach them. But at this point, school services aren’t too much of what we do.
What can be done about this situation?
One thing we’re working on now is a redo of the FEFE curriculum, to bring it up to date and to teach more responsible attitudes as well as skills. Nationally, I think educators are doing a dismal job of it, really.
I think sometimes that responsible attitudes about saving and credit and budgeting have jumped a generation … from our parents, right over us to our kids’ detriment.
There is no doubt that the Depression generation grew up with the attitude that they had to save if they were going to eat. They just didn’t have money to play with, so they took it very seriously. But, our generation learned the lesson that you could “buy now, pay later,” because times were different after the War. The American economy was booming, people were making more money, and goods, like housing, were increasing in value—credit was easy. We spent a lot and borrowed a lot. But, we were making pretty good money to keep the economy going. Our kids became worse in their attitude, some of them even borrowing 125 percent of the worth of their homes, so that now that sector has collapsed. People are losing their jobs and can’t pay their mortgages and are going bankrupt. I think what will happen is that this younger generation will be scared enough to change its attitude about what it means to achieve the American Dream. People are being forced to learn new lessons. They can no longer use credit cards to get by, because the credit-card companies have started to up the ante by increasing interest rates and getting tougher in their penalties. This is the point when people call us for credit counseling.
What’s your take on this situation? Will it improve any time soon?
I’m optimistic that over the long term—maybe 15 years or so—it’ll improve, as more people understand the situation and change their attitude and approach to personal finance. Unfortunately, we see a lot of college freshmen and sophomores who use the “free” credit cards that the companies send out for things like pizza and beer, and suddenly run up a $2,000 balance—and the companies are coming after them. The good news, I guess, is that they’re calling us for credit counseling.
Your background is in technology as well as education. What’s on the horizon at TCA for utilizing technology in its programs?
We’ve developed the Learning Management System for employees and clients, which provides courses appropriate for those groups online. I did some half-hour Budget Doctor discussions of personal finance topics on the radio once a week, and we’re planning to do more webinars and videos online. We consider our agency to be a leader in credit counseling, one of the ten largest in the country in terms of the volume of work. We also published an electronic textbook that is available online at our client site and we distribute it and budgeting software on CD to clients.
What is the most satisfying aspect of your job?
The one-on-one question-and-answer segment online as Budget Doctor is what I find most satisfying. I enjoy responding to a specific question and feeling that I’m applying meaningful help to a real person’s problem.
What is the most challenging aspect of your job?
The educational outreach to schools. When only nine states require testing on personal finance, it isn’t important to the teachers, so the students don’t think it’s important, and parents aren’t very interested in it, either. There is no push to emphasize it. Now, of course, there’s more interest, considering the state of our economy, but it’s still not the most important thing in the curriculum. I’ve worked with the Jump$tart Coalition and I’ve found that experience to be frustrating. Educators, in general, talk a great game but don’t produce results very quickly. I’ve spent 40 years trying to make a difference in schools, one way or another, so I shouldn’t be surprised by this. I’m trying to appreciate the small victories.
What’s your opinion of school choice and vouchers? Do you think this trend will improve public education?
It’s taken hold in the American consciousness, and I think it’s good in the sense that competition is good. Unfortunately, I see too many parents making choices based on emotion and not on facts or research or what might be best for their children in terms of socialization. For that reason, I don’t see school choice as revolutionizing American society. People tend to gravitate toward others like themselves; we move into camps where we’re most comfortable. So, I’m not sure that school choice will make a whole lot of difference for the future of our society.
Mike Sullivan can be reached at Take Charge America at 1-800-823-7396, ext. 4112; or at the Budget Doctor Web site.