Acknowledgement

Our thanks to the local businesses who have underwritten our community programs.

The 3Rivers Credit Union Foundation.  3Rivers is here for you: here for good!

Fort Wayne Door, Inc. Fort Wayne Door is your complete garage door services center.

The Abundant Life Church. I’ll see you there, it’s a Great Place To Be! There’s always SOMETHING HAPPENING at ALC!

American Programmers Independent, LLC. When you want something done, call API.

Overview

In year 2022 many people came to the realization that they must take steps to protect their families financially.

The same challenges confronted businesses as in prior years, while the same sound business policy – rejecting debt and all enticements to politicize the business – proved fundamental in prospering. During the latter half of 2022 in-person training became possible as COVID restrictions eased, but training older displaced workers in marketable job skills remained impossible due to the remaining Federal COVID mandates. Zoom continued to be a very useful means of conducting classes for those able to use a computer.

Our financial condition strengthened by just under $2,000.

Financial Literacy Program

People appear to want Financial Literacy training this year a lot more than in the prior decade.

We ran seven (7) Financial Peace University classes in year 2022 and people could also self-study through the program at their own pace using the Ramsey Plus website without attending our FPU classes. Years 2020-2021 had just  under fifty (50) people each in self-study through the site license plus FPU classes, but Year 2022 had three hundred thirty three (333) active participants through our site license including fifty (50) who also registered in our FPU classes. Thirty-nine (39) more people registered in the first two weeks this year. Sixty-three (63) people and three  (3) churches came together for our FPU class in Lyttleton, South Africa. Our first Zoom class in January had sixteen (16) participating – a record high. Fifty (50) attended our state-side classes via Zoom or in-person in Fort Wayne. Total non-mortgage debt paid off was $661,332, money saved was $60,276, Credit Cards cut up was sixty-two (62), giving for the first time were six (6), and giving significantly more were fifteen (15).

The unlimited Ramsey+ Site License was instrumental in achieving this level of success. Whether or not our success was connected to Ramsey discontinuing the unlimited site license is unknown at this time, but they have decided to sell us only a limited site license moving forward. We will revisit this change as we accumulate performance data and allow time for Ramsey to re-think this decision, near the end of year 2023.

Expansion to include Teens

For the coming year we would like to include the Ramsey Education, Foundations in Personal Finance, teen curriculum. It has been revised extensively since we last tried it without success, and the videos (although still too long) are improved. There are thirteen (13) lessons in the curriculum and some additional assets, such as a gradebook, which are not useful to us. The most significant issue is the price, which is $5,579.99 for an unlimited license. A bit high.  The unlimited site license for Ramsey Plus is $2,500.  A viable alternative is to produce our own as we have done in the past for computer classes, to teach the same principals as FPU but in a way more respectful of the learning style in teens.

Outreach

We believe a major cause of low participation in prior years was lack of awareness. Our primary means of outreach had been FaceBook and places where free ads can be placed such as the library TV network.  FaceBook has been unreliable as an advertising medium but does produce a few registrations.

Google Ads, on the other hand, seem to work very nicely. The ads direct people to our landing page at https://alt-fw.org/outreach/ or to specific posts on our main site. We get one to three ( 1 to 3) registrations for classes each week from Google Ads. The ads are paid through a grant from Google.

Other advertising means

Free advertising has its limits. We would also like to work with paid advertising because it is more likely to produce consistently effective results of families in our local community who will come in-person to our classes. Most “free” ads require just as much work but are likely to have little or no impact. There is also a question as to whether we can obtain sufficient funds to buy paid ad space. Perhaps we can approach ad companies who control area bulletin boards to place our short text and QR Code ad on unoccupied boards. We would also like to persuade 3Rivers Federal Credit Union to add our short text ad and QR Code to their rotating video ads on the screens in each 3Rivers branch throughout year 2023.

Volunteers

With increased participation comes the need for increased trainers. We need an outreach for people able and willing to donate time to lead one or more Financial Literacy class individually or through their organization. This is another area where membership on an Advisory Board becomes helpful, as board members would help facilitate.

Employment Program

The health and political complexities created by COVID continued to prevent in-person meetings for employment training. This did not exempt us from continuing to maintain the computer software and repair failed equipment. We lost one large printer but had no other major computer failures.

I lieu of the Senior Aides daily schedule, we have been working with Allen County Public Libraries (ACPL) and Fort Wayne Housing Authority (FWHA) to provide mobile device (Device Advice) classes at multiple ACPL branch and FWHA residence locations.

Budget

Income for year 2022 was $102.13 cash, $5,400 grants, $62,390 donations in kind,  and $2.53 interest earned. Expenses came to $66,058 – a gain of $1,836.26. The largest in-kind grants were from Microsoft ($34,790.00) and covered the costs of our Azure web services, and licenses for Office 365, Office 2019, and Windows 10 Enterprise for our computer training lab. Google grants of about $300 per day started at year-end and were not included in the year 2022 accounting.

Financial Literacy Program expenses came to $8,689.64 (licenses $7,838.80, materials $377.74, Services, $450, and Promotions $23.10) and Employment Program expenses came to $1,240.52 (equipment $1,050.58, subscriptions $96.02, materials $93.92). Expenses common to all programs were $64,749.95 (licenses and fees $44,756.91, occupancy $18,000, equipment maintenance $977.53, office consumables $673.54, and hospitality supplies $341.97).

Adult Life Training, Inc. is an all-volunteer organization and as such does not have payroll related expenses of any kind.

Last year’s financial statements are published on https://alt-fw.org/public/?page_id=3115.