A high school junior has watched her family make many mistakes with their money and realizes she cannot rely on them to give her good financial advice.

“They buy things they don’t need,” she said. “They just buy just for being popular or something and it's not good.”

So, she joined the Girls’ Investing Club at Herriman High School and is learning to take control of her own financial future.

“I think investing is really important and I think everyone needs to learn about it,” she said.

The Girls’ Investing Club was started this fall by seniors Lizzie Anderson and Kaylee Arsenault, and junior Baylee Zuniga, as part of the InvestHER Initiative they developed for a DECA business competition.

“The goal is to improve financial literacy for women, because we found that there's a major lack in education for women when it comes to finances,” Anderson said. “We want to try and help women know how to invest, know how to be a finance professional and feel confident in that.”

Club members meet monthly to hear guest speakers talk about investments topics such as the stock market, mutual funds and investing in real estate and business. 

Vincenza Vicari-Bentley, a financial counselor and Head of Financial Wellness at Utah State University, spoke at the Oct. 18 meeting. She showed club members the value of educating themselves, the reasons for beginning to invest early, and warned them about get-rich-quick schemes.

Members tell club leaders which topics they want to learn about, and they invite businesswomen in the community to present information on those topics.

“We had a lot of girls asking questions about starting their own businesses, which was incredible, and so we just want to make it easier for them to be able to do that,” Zuniga said. She is arranging for a woman, who is an immigrant and owns her own company, to be a future guest speaker.

A sophomore student said, “I joined the club because I've always heard about investing in things, but I've never known what it is, so I wanted to know more about it.” Another sophomore said she’d always heard investing was good to start at a young age and with the club she is learning how. Club members participate in a stock market simulation to give them some hands-on experience with buying and selling stocks.

“We believe the best way to learn to invest is by doing it,” Anderson told club members.

The three club founders are excited about the response from their peers—they have more than 110 members (which even includes a few boys.) They’ve also had a positive response from community members and businesses. Crumbl Cookies donated cookies for club meetings and Cyprus Credit Union gave them a grant. After their first guest speaker tagged them on her social media, a business owner reached out. That relationship resulted in a partnership to provide free swag for club members.

“Instead of doing club shirts for everybody, we're actually getting customized Pura Vida bracelets through GIMME beauty,” Arsenault said.

The three club founders had different reasons for starting the club.

Anderson realized she lacked knowledge when she took a college level finance class.

“For a lot of it, I had no idea what any of the words that were being said meant,” she said. “I was really intrigued by it and wanted to learn more about finance and investments.”

She was determined to educate herself so that she can live the life she wants.

“There are studies that have been showing recently that five years from now, the middle class won’t be able to afford things like housing and new cars and college education and a lot of just basic needs, and so I want to make sure that I combat that by being very knowledgeable about my finances, so that I can reach financial stability and then invest from there, so I can not only have financial stability but the freedom to make a more high quality life for me and my family,” Anderson said.

After realizing she could either depend on her dad to help her with taxes or learn to do it herself, Arsenault decided she didn’t want to be dependent on someone else for her financial decisions.

The two seniors began developing the InvestHER Initiative at the beginning of the school year and soon teamed up with Zuniga, who had had a different experience. Her mom had taught her about investing and IRAs from a young age, and as a prerequisite for getting her own car, Zuniga had to read 50 financial books. She is passionate about sharing what she knows with others because she knows not everyone has parents or finance classes that have taught them the skills to be financially prepared for adulthood.

“We just want to be that resource for kids at school,” Zuniga said. “We want to make sure that the members in our group are prepared for their life. In school, there are financial literacy classes, but school doesn't really prepare you for the real world. And so, like in my personal experience, it's just really making it normal for the younger generation to have jobs, to start earning money, to start investing.”

The club has an Instagram platform and a website with resources, book recommendations and links to informative videos about investing.

Hoping to widen their reach of educating and empowering girls and women, the three club leaders are working to arrange financial education presentations at local middle schools, the YWCA, homeless shelters and community organizations.

“This has become so much more than the DECA projects for us,” Anderson said.

The club leaders believe they are helping club members become more knowledgeable about investing, which will lead them to make better financial decisions, reach their financial goals, improve their self-esteem and build a strong networking system of friends. λ