I taught Saving and Investing at the National Public Library of Costa Rica in March, 2011. A photo of the Library is attached.All of my teaching was in Spanish. First I had to teach myself how investing worked in Costa Rica. To do so, I read the financial newspaper and I interviewed Costa Rican financial professionals in Spanish. It was very challenging.
When teaching investing I used examples from real life. I showed an offer from the Bank of Costa Rica (BCR) . If people invested by April, 2011 they could receive very high interest. I also used Bond Fund information that Banco Popular shared with me. I taught people how to read Fact Sheets and compare January 2010 to June 2010 information for different funds with different risk profiles. After considerable practice, I divided my class into smaller groups. Each group was assigned a different fund and was to report on changes from January to June (2010), composition of the fund i.e. were all of the bonds government bonds or were some instruments business bonds . Because Costa Rica is such a small country there wasn't nearly as large a selection of investments as we are accustomed to in the U.S. Also I pointed out that different bonds had different expiration dates and showed participants how they could identify those.
To teach the Saving session, I also had to teach myself about the Costa Rican every day life matters. How much were people paying for cell phone use, basic food items, transportation and more. I spent a great deal of time going to the grocery store, taking public transportation and interviewing accountants and others.
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