Growing up in St. Kitts and Nevis, I absorbed valuable financial lessons from daily life. “Take a little and live long,” was one common saying that emphasized the important practice of living within your means. Other lessons, like building a healthy habit of savings and repaying financial obligations on time, became ingrained in my mindset. Though practical and sound, these principles were insufficient guides when I found myself grappling with a daunting $189,000 Eastern Caribbean Dollars (EC) in mostly student loan debt as a new university graduate.

A Journey of Personal Finance Self-Education

After securing an entry-level position in engineering consulting, I felt stumped about how I could effectively tackle such a large amount of debt, accumulate savings, buy a home, and invest for the long term, while simultaneously meeting familial financial obligations.

Throughout college and graduate school, I learned very little about personal finance in real life, knew nothing about investing and lacked enough money knowledge to understand how to balance massive debt, adult financial responsibilities, and big money goals.

That’s when I looked for free resources to expand my money knowledge. I borrowed books from the local public library, attended free webinars, and read, listened, and watched as many online personal finance blogs, podcasts and videos as I could. Through this process of personal finance self-education, I realized:

• I had a negative net worth.

• Interest builds up on my student loan debt every day.

• There’s a simple approach to stock market investing.

• Budgeting alone wouldn’t cut it.

And most of all, I needed a money management plan.

Building A Personal Money Management Plan

To put everything I learned into practice, I created a money management plan for myself to:

• Organize my finances into 4 categories (saving & investing, debt payoff, needs, and wants).

• Create savings and investing goals and a debt payoff plan; and

• Plan out 12 monthly budgets, a year in advance.

From there, I committed to prioritizing my money goals, kept track of my progress and got some amazing results – I paid off $90,000 EC in debt, purchased a home, invested almost $100,000 EC for the long term and increased my net worth by over $200,000 EC in just 5 years!

Accessible Financial Education for the Eastern Caribbean

I know how fortunate I was to start my personal finance journey in the United States. There, financial education resources are widely accessible through:

• Public e-library resources;

• Workplace digital financial wellness portals, and

• The web, in every format you can imagine.

Oftentimes, at little to no cost.

Such easy access to online financial education helped me learn more about money, build a solid financial foundation, work toward wealth, and overcome major life events that set me back financially.

When I returned to St. Kitts & Nevis during the COVID-19 pandemic, I soon recognized how the low adult financial literacy rate fuels unsustainable levels of non-performing loans locally, and across the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). Meanwhile, there is a scarcity of free and readily available financial education resources and programs for adults.

This problem of inaccessibility led me to develop a digital solution – Your Money Worth App.

Your Money Worth App

The Financial Education & Financial Wellness Platform

About Your Money Worth App

Your Money Worth App is the all-in-one digital platform designed to boost users' financial skills and institutions’ financial health with a culturally relevant, engaging, and measurable solution. Caribbean Institutions can partner to contribute to the development of this solution, here.

Individual users can learn more about getting early access to the first version of the web app at beta.yourmneyworth.com.