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Overview

Juliana Mason has worked with many college students over the past two years, making sure they’re on solid financial ground while pursuing their degree. Mason is a senior at East Carolina University with a dual major in accounting and finance and a certification in applied data analytics. She’s also a financial wellness coach at ECU’s Financial Wellness Hub, which means she’s one of four students who mentor their peers around literacy, budgeting and planning.

ECU became an Arbol customer this summer, and peer mentors like Mason use the platform to give students a full understanding of their financial information, then deliver a personalized financial plan and access to on-campus resources. Mason is on the front lines of a broader national movement to promote financial wellness in higher education. She sat down with the Arbol team recently to talk about that experience.

How did you become a financial wellness coach?‍

ECU is a beautiful campus with a lot of students, and I want to use this time to build relationships with people. One of the ways I do that is through Phi Sigma Phi, which is ECU’s chapter of the national honor society. I serve as treasurer there and have developed many personal relationships that way. In the meantime, I was looking for a job related to my field of work and I stumbled upon this position. As a dual accounting and finance major, I felt like it was another opportunity to improve my people skills.

‍You interact with many peers who are in need of coaching. What are your observations of the challenges college students face today?

A lot of the students I work with have never built a budget before. They want to save money but they don’t know what steps to actually get there. Without that structure, they tend to overspend on things like eating out without controlling the frequency or finding a less expensive place to eat. So a lot of the work is really just giving them clarity of their financial situation and then some structure on how much they can spend.‍‍

‍What do you think drives that lack of preparation?

Most incoming college students are not trained to pay attention to their bank account, let alone to journal out how much they’re spending and what they’re spending it on. It’s very easy for students to get a credit card and then, in a new environment, not realize how much debt they’re taking on, especially with the amount of on-campus eating options that are outside the meal plan.

They’re just thinking, ‘I’m hungry’ not ‘I just spent $200 this month eating out.’‍

How do you get them back on track?

The most we can do is provide recommendations, and the first recommendation is always that students take note of what they’re spending and when they’re spending it. If you spend $10 on a plate at Panda Express, write it down. If you decide to go to Starbucks, write it down. And then take 10 to 15 minutes a day to see how that relates to the budget, which is a way of taking charge of their behavior and changing it if necessary.

Walk us through that experience of using Arbol for student coaching.

I was introduced to Arbol through my position at the Financial Wellness Hub and through (Kevin Sutton, director of the hub).Students who come in struggle to visualize their financial situation or how much college is going to be. They don’t dig into their billing statements or their bank accounts on a daily basis. Through Arbol, they see a full visualization of their college and personal expenses, their income and the gaps that exist. The platform takes a lot of information from different places and simplifies it for the students so they can visualize where the money is going.

The format is very tailored to ECU and reflects each students’ tuition costs, room and board, which makes it easy to build an accurate budget. Without Arbol that information can be difficult for students to access. For example, most students don’t know how to navigate the website to find their billing statement, which tells them how much tuition costs. They might not know how to apply for FAFSA and other resources which are all very easy to access with Arbol.

How much coaching do you do?

I see about six or seven students a week, mostly through our college preparation class for freshmen and other programs where students are required or strongly encouraged to visit the Financial Wellness Hub. Some of them have assignments around building a budget, learning about credits cards and student loans and receiving one-on-one coaching. Other students have to meet with us to keep their financial aid, and we’ve started introducing the hub to students who are getting scholarships.

We’ve all been experimenting with Arbol and figuring it out in our own way. It’s something that is delivered to students very easily, alongside other resources such as a physical copy of an expense journal, to start the conversation with them.

What happens through this work?

When students have all their information in one place, it flips a switch where they say ‘I really need to start budgeting for this.’ The student becomes much more engaged and energized to take control of their situation. A lot of them have been ignoring the financial picture and hoping it works out, but you can see there’s a lot of relief when they understand it. You can see this transition when they come in for follow-up appointments. Initially they’re disorganized. They come back in and they’re a whole different person because of how organized they are.

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