2023 Report: Our Military FI Resources Take Root

What an eventful, and perhaps, strange, year 2023 has been.

The stock market closed the year strong, and inflation has finally started to ease.

The Fed finally stopped raising rates towards the end of the year, and talks of a “soft landing” abound.

But on a day-to-day level, I seem to hear about people around me losing their jobs.

That strange feeling carries over to when I go into the grocery store to get the basics. I often leave feeling a little shell-shocked at how much a dozen eggs costs now.

(I promise that’ll be the only bad pun in this report!)

Soft landing or no, we at the ChooseFI Foundation continued to keep our heads down, kept our expenses lean, and keep on keeping on.

We even launched our new Military FI curriculum, designed as an educational resource to help leaders in the armed services coach the men and women in their units.

Now lets review how our main programs fared in 2023. We’ll start by looking at our 2 existing programs, FI 101, and the PreK-12 Curriculum.

As always, we’ll report on our financial health. Spoiler alert – we again managed to stretch every dollar that was gifted to us!

2023 in review

We’ll kick off this review by coming back to a metric that we started tracking in 2021.

This number is an approximation that takes into account how much the Foundation has spent in a year, divided by how many signed up for one of our resources.

That yields a blunt but handy way to estimate how much it cost for us to help a new person discover financial literacy each calendar year.

That number for 2023 is: 

Only 93 cents to help a person find financial literacy

Here are the relevant numbers.

In 2023, we received $12,692.69  (after deducting PayPal fees) in donations, down from 27,366.41 in 2022.

Yes, the amount of donations more than halved, but we’re ok because of how lean we’ve kept expenses. We almost halved our annual expenses, from $8,115.33 in 2022 down to $4,250.35 in 2023.

The reason for the lower operating costs in 2023 was that our team was able to complete the new Military FI resources in 2022, making that a one-time investment that did not carry into 2023.

To keep expenses low, we shelved projects that we had wanted to undertake for 2023. More on that later.

All told, we reached a total of 4,565 new people (see the next 2 sections for the breakdown by resource), which works out to around $0.93 per user!

That’s a phenomenal number, especially with us being so frugal with our funds.

Here are more details:

Financial Independence 101

In 2023, another 2,945 people signed up for, and completed, our donor-supported Financial Independence 101. This brings the total as of Dec 31, 2023, to 11,944, making it an increase of 32.7% from 2022’s base of 8,999.

If you know someone who might need a course like this to help repair their financial health, please invite them to sign up for the free course. It will make all the difference to their futures, and costs them nothing. 

PreK-12 Financial Literacy Curriculum

2023 saw about 1,620 educators access the Foundation's financial literacy curriculum for students ranging from Pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade.

These educators are incredible force multipliers in bringing financial literacy to future generations, and it’s great to see the continued interest from these important people!

The 2023 numbers represent a solid increase over 2022, with all grade levels growing by around 20-30%. Here is the breakdown :

Reflecting back on our goals for 2023

I’d like to take a moment to look back at some of the projects that we had hoped to undertake, all of which we pressed pause on. The common thread here was our decision to cut back on our expenses.

One of those plans was to revisit our marketing strategy on social media platforms. As the year rolled along, and donations continued to be few and far between, it felt reckless to spend our funds this way.

Another project that we shelved, again, was our plan to leave the Kajabi platform we had started with.

After receiving a few quotes from user interface and user experience specialists, as well as from a designer, we decided to, yet again, kick this can down the street.

Military FI Resources Gain Traction!

The one big thing that we’re to see traction is that more than 100 people accessed the Military FI resources in 2023.

These resources, created by Stephen Heptig and Crystal Agbalog, are part of an instructor-led military FI curriculum designed to be used on-base by leaders for young soldiers, airman, sailors and marines. 

If you are a leader in the military, or are involved with supporting veterans, you can access the Military FI Instructor resource kit here. 

Looking forward to 2024

Looking ahead to this year, we have one simple goal – and that is to dip our toe back into digital marketing and getting our Mil FI resources in front of the people who need it.

As always, we will continue to help underserved communities become financially healthy, while making sure we stretch every single dollar.

If you would like to help us reach more people, please consider sharing:

1. Our Military FI resources, using this link.
2. Sharing the PreK-12 FinLit Curriculum (if they are an educator)
3. The FI 101 course.

All are, and will always be, free.

And as always, if you would like to also make a small monthly contribution of $10, here is a link to do so.

Thank you all for a great 2023, and onward!