Curbing the Financial Exploitation of the Poor: Financial Literacy and Social Work Education

Abstract

The article investigates the importance of financial literacy content for social work students who at some point in their career will encounter financially-excluded clients. Financial literacy content can include understanding how fringe economy businesses operate, including their business model, knowledge of local and national nonpredatory financial services, understanding credit and the credit industry, and knowledge of state and national regulations governing high-cost financial services. This article also examines the financial literacy gap in social work education and provides an overview of some key fringe economy enterprises, such as payday lenders, car title pawns, pawnshops, rent-to-own businesses, buy-here-pay-here used car lots, and debit/credit cards. Last, the article explores ways to integrate financial literacy training with traditional social work skills.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.