Maria found food. But Friday she cashes her paycheck at the place on the corner — $12 gone, every week. That's $624 a year paying for something a bank account does for free. Her landlord raised the rent last month. She doesn't know if that's legal. She signed the lease in English and isn't sure what it says. The credit card she opened to cover a car repair charges 26% interest — she pays $35 a month and the balance doesn't move.
The systems around Maria aren't broken. They're working exactly as designed — for someone else. Understanding how they work is the first step to making them work for her.
Self-paced course covering budgeting, credit, taxes, investments, and fraud. Video lessons and practice. Completely free, no account required to browse. Mobile app available.
14 interactive money management topics. Not copyrighted — free to use, share, and adapt. Available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Hmong, Korean, Vietnamese, and Russian.
From the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. "Your Money, Your Goals" toolkit. Financial well-being questionnaire. Ask CFPB knowledge base. Open complaint database to check your lender.
One-stop portal aggregating financial tools from 20+ federal agencies. Earning, saving, protecting, spending, borrowing — organized by life event.
Free financial education from the FDIC — banking, saving, spending choices. Available in 7 languages.
💬 Discuss money & credit →Short videos from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. How credit works, what hurts your score, how to build it.
💬 Discuss credit & debt →20+ interactive games about how government works. No login needed. Works on any device. Founded by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Used by 9 million+ students — and works just as well for adults.
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Track what Congress is doing. See who voted for what. Follow specific bills. All data is public domain and open source.
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Crash Course Government — the legislative process in 7 minutes. Clear, engaging, nonpartisan. 2.5M+ views.
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Where federal money goes. Search by zip code, agency, or program. See how much funding your community receives. No API key required.
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Maria knows her rights now. She opened a free bank account. She read her lease. But she still doesn't know that Ana — three blocks away — has extra food from her garden, knows a lawyer who helps with leases, and watches kids on Thursday afternoons. The problem was never scarcity. It was that neighbors who could help each other couldn't find each other.
How do they find each other? →Every resource on this page is free. No account. No data collected.