Financial Education Key To Counter Crisis

FINANCIAL education is deemed necessary for over-seas Filipino workers (OFWs) nowadays in the wake of the loom-ing global economic meltdown, of-ficials from a marketing group said.

Jose Enrique de las Peñas, International Marketing Group (IMG) president believes that financial education, especially among OFWs that are lucky to still have jobs abroad, helps them offset the fears brought about by the ongoing financial crisis.

"What OFWs and Filipinos, in general, need right now is financial education. They have to increase their knowledge on the right way of savings and on how to take care of their finances and reduce the risk of losing what they have," he said. De las Peñas underscored the huge significance of financial edu-cation for Filipinos, "where every-one seems to be in fear of the nega-tive prospects of the future."

IMG, a marketing company dedicated to serving the financial needs of individuals, has close to 20,000 OFW members nationwide that have availed of their free financial education seminars. Majority of these OFWs are working in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Middle East and Europe. IMG Chief Executive Officer Noel Arandilla said the common miscon-ception of financial education is that it should only be lim-ited to the elite or the well-educated. "Everyone has their equal rights to be wealthy only that the masses are afraid to go out of their comfort zones and be ed-ucated on how to increase their finances. The lack of education is keeping some of us unequipped to the pos-sible effects of the crisis," Arandilla said.

IMG seminars, facilitat-ed by their own financial advisers, are now starting to attract people from dif-ferent professions including doctors, engineers, teachers, factory and office work-ers, among others, Arandilla noted. "A lot of businesses are already facing fears and signs that their companies might not survive the crisis. They ask our help to educate them and help them build their financial foun-dation," said De Las Peñas, adding a significant interest among corporations seek-ing their advice. He said that at the height of today's financial turmoil, many companies from in-dustries such as informa-tion technology, electronic; and education have sought their financial guidance as these sectors have been hit hard by the crisis.

"Fear of the uncertain-ty of the economy could be battled through financial education. With this, you can take positive, proactive and informative actions and will not be in a panic mode wherein you cannot do right decisions," De las Peñas advice. IMG has 30,000 members across the country. It is one of the big-gest and fastest growing fi-nancial distribution com-panies in the US, Canada, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.