Financial Awareness Counseling is a tool that can help you understand your student loans, manage spending, develop repayment plans, avoid default, and make finances your priority. This step-by-step guide will help you put all the pieces together by allowing you to access your actual or estimated loan debt, consider your expenses, and formulate a plan for repayment according to your expected income.

This counseling tool also provides resources for temporarily postponing your payments after graduation, ways to have your loans forgiven, and tips for avoiding delinquency and default.  When you log on to the Financial Awareness Counseling tool using your StudentLoans.gov password, your NSLDS loan history is displayed within the counseling session.

Why is Financial Literacy so important?  Because most students come to college with limited experience living on a budget or managing their daily financial affairs. The day-to-day demands and costs of attending college can cause some students to get into financial trouble by racking up credit card debts on top of their student loans. Columbia College Hollywood is committed to providing our students with the tools they need to boost their financial knowledge in order to achieve their educational and career goals.

Columbia College Hollywood has also partnered with Cash Course, a website that provides a wide variety of resources that can help you navigate your finances. Use the tools provided to learn to create a budget, manage your everyday expenditures, protect your credit, stretch your dollars, set financial goals, and pay for college.

Cash Course also provides tools for your life after college, giving you plans and tips on how to transition from college to working life. Cash Course has also developed worksheets to help you organize your finances.

Students at Stanford, UCLA and USC all use Cash Course. Click the image below to get started. It’s online and it’s free!

Other Links

Mapping Your Future offers an online life skills and financial literacy game at Show Me the Future.

iGrad provides colleges with online student financial literacy resources like student loan calculators, budgeting worksheets financial learning modules.