Updated: August 2007

MoneyWi$e

Consumer Action and Capital One first launched the MoneyWi$e partnership in November 2001. Since then, the program has produced and distributed a series of MoneyWi$e educational materials to provide consumers with the building blocks for developing and honing personal finance skills, from saving and budgeting to balancing a checkbook, to understanding the basics of credit and credit repair and how parents can talk to teenagers about money.

By providing free brochures in multiple languages (English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese), the MoneyWi$e program is able to address financial literacy across both income and ethnic barriers. More than one million brochures have been distributed to date.

The roles of the partners

Consumer Action and Capital One brought their greatest strengths to the project:

Consumer Action created and translated the educational materials, including brochures, leader’s guides, classroom curricula and Power Point teaching decks for each module. The non-profit organization also posted the materials on the Internet, trained Capital One volunteers and organized the regional meeting and MoneyWi$e outreach workshops in California, Florida, Idaho and Washington state throughout 2002. Consumer Action’s Director of Advocacy Cher McIntyre headed the committee to choose stipend recipients in a competitive application process.

Capital One provided the funding to create the MoneyWi$e program and devised an innovative employee volunteer program for Capital One employees. Trained by Consumer Action, and equipped with materials, a training manual and a curriculum, Capital One employees volunteer in communities near the company’s headquarters in Virginia to teach financial education to the public. The company has tallied feedback from the Good Credit trainings conducted by its employees, and it is overwhelmingly positive.

About the partners

Consumer Action: A national non-profit, membership-based organization founded in San Francisco in 1971, Consumer Action serves consumers nationwide by advancing consumer rights, referring consumers to complaint-handling agencies and publishing free multilingual educational materials. Consumer Action also advocates for consumers in the media and before lawmakers and compares prices on credit cards, bank accounts and long distance services.

Capital One: Headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, Capital One, a Fortune 500 company, is one of the largest providers of MasterCard and Visa credit cards in the world. Capital One trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "COF" and is included in the S&P 500 index.