Visa Teams With Television Stars to Promote Financial Literacy

SAN FRANCISCO – Visa puts star power behind the Practical Money Skills for Life financial education program by launching the new Financial Advice and Money Experience (F.A.M.E.) network. F.A.M.E. celebrities will offer helpful advice, personal anecdotes and philosophies on money management to consumers.

Visa’s Practical Money Skills for Life Web site offers financial guidance and money management skills for teachers, students, parents and consumers of any age. The F.A.M.E. cast on www.practicalmoneyskills.com will include primetime television personalities such as Jane Kaczmarek (Lois from FOX’s “Malcolm in the Middle”), Cheryl Hines (Cheryl David from HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) and Jasmine Guy (Roxy from Showtime’s “Dead Like Me”).

“Through Practical Money Skills for Life, Visa provides parents, educators and consumers interactive lessons on smart money management,” said Rosetta Jones, vice president, Visa USA. “We believe that the real-life success stories of Jane, Cheryl and Jasmine will inspire our users and will help reinforce important financial basics like budgeting, saving and spending within your means.”

Besides providing award-winning performances on “Malcolm in the Middle,” Jane Kaczmarek’s biggest priority is caring for her children and teaching them to save and share.

In fact, she founded the Clothes Off Our Back Foundation, which collects red-carpet clothing and items from celebrities and auctions them off to benefit children’s charities. Kaczmarek’s dedication to donating time and money to charities stems from her wanting to share her good fortune with others, particularly to children with special needs. Kaczmarek highlights the challenges she faced earlier in her acting career and her strategies for managing her limited funds. Her success strategy was to pay her bills on time and save as much as possible so she would be prepared when work slows down.

Cheryl Hines has had an incredibly busy year, starring in two primetime television series, (HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and NBC’s “Father of the Pride”) and completed production in five feature films this past summer. Her biggest achievement this past year was the birth of her baby daughter in March 2004. As expected with any Hollywood career, though, times were not always so busy or lucrative. Planning her move from Florida to Los Angeles was the first time she worried about saving and developing a financial plan, and she found it was not as easy as expected. Now that she is a parent herself, she sees the importance of offering children new opportunities to learn, which is why she also has become involved in Clothes Off Our Back with Jane Kaczmarek and is excited to help consumers learn better money management skills.

Jasmine Guy, best known for her role as Whitley Gilbert on “A Different World,” is now appearing as Roxy on Showtime’s “Dead Like Me.” Besides using the Practical Money Skills website to teach her 5 year-old daughter about the value of money and implementing an allowance in their household, Guy is hoping to integrate the financial literacy program into her work at “A Place Called Home,” a safe house in South Central Los Angeles that she has been involved with for more than 10 years. She founded the dance program there, which her sister now runs.

The advice and real-life experiences from the celebrities will be available at www.practicalmoneyskills.com beginning December 6.

About Practical Money Skills for Life
The Practical Money Skills for Life curriculum is teacher tested and teacher approved. At the 2001 National Education Association Expo, the program was put before teachers to evaluate and grade. Nearly 100 percent of teachers who reviewed the site said they approve of the Practical Money Skills for Life program; 98 percent said they would recommend the site to other educators, and 94 percent gave the program a “B” or better. The curriculum currently reaches 2.5 million teachers, 37 million students and 100,000 schools. Additionally, this program won the National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators 2002 Achievement in Consumer Education Award (ACE) for the best innovative program for the private sector and was named an “Honorable Mention” by the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy’s 2002 Soaring$tar Award.

About Visa
Visa is the world’s leading payment brand and largest consumer payment system, enabling banks to provide their consumer and merchant customers with a wide variety of payment alternatives. Nearly 21,000 financial institutions worldwide rely on Visa’s processing system, VisaNet, to facilitate $2.5 trillion in annual transaction volume with virtually 100-percent reliability. Consumers in more than 150 countries carry more than 1 billion visa-branded cards, accepted at millions of locations worldwide. Within the United States, nearly 14,000 financial institutions issue 429 million Visa cards, accounting for more than $1.1 trillion in annual transaction volume. Visa offers a trusted, reliable and convenient way to access and mobilize financial resources — anytime, anywhere, any way. For more information about Visa, please visit www.visa.com.