FIVE YEARS OF REALITY CHECK

By Justine Wettschreck Another successful Reality Check took place on Monday, with more than two dozen volunteers and approximately 75 high school seniors from both MCC and Fulda.

Reality Check is an annual financial literacy simulation for high school seniors, designed to teach real-life budgeting. Students are assigned a career and salary, then play plinko to find out their marital status. They pick a rabbit out of a hat to see how many kids they are supporting. Then they visit booths to make financial decisions, learning to manage expenses based on their lifestyle.

Started in 2022, Reality Check celebrated five years of teaching seniors that budgeting for life’s unexpected challenges is trickier than they think. There’s even a booth for Life’s Unexpected, where seniors have to draw a card and deal with whatever it says. Do your kids need new ballet outfits? Did the water heater just die? Did Grandma just send you $50 for your birthday? It’s all in the cards.

Each year, the students fill out a survey after their Reality Check is done.

The most common word you’ll find on the open-ended questions? Expensive.

“Life is expensive.” “Groceries are expensive.” “Childcare is very expensive.” But they learn a lesson along with the expense.

“You don’t have to always have the biggest and best stuff.”

“You need housing and important stuff before you blow it on fun stuff.”

Students said they also learned how to count back change, to be creative, how to spend wisely, and to do better at managing their money.

“It’s not my financial habits, it was the wife and children,” one commented.

“I’ll try to think smarter about the little things I’m buying, like coffee,” another said.

Almost 94 percent of the students who responded to the survey said they met at least one new adult from their community during Reality Check.

Of all the student responses received, my favorite was not hard to pick out. One student wrote, “Kids are expensive and should be avoided. I also learned I should not be a reporter.”

Thank you to all of the amazing volunteers who help make this program possible - the ones who faithfully show up every year, and the new faces who bravely sit behind a booth with the instructions to “make it fun.” You are very appreciated.