Financial literacy is one challenge in a developing economy. In the Philippines where there are lots of Filipinos working abroad, financial education should be a must.
Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) Filip “Floi” C. Wycoco has embraced this advocacy and founded The Global Filipino Investors Inc. (TGFI) to pursue his goal of making Filipinos, particularly OFWs, become savers and investors.
OFWs are interested in financial education, too. They would like to ensure that their hard-earned money does not go to waste but lack the knowledge how to manage their resources and how to invest wisely.
TGFI partcipates to events focusing on financial education like investing in the stock market, mutual funds, and other investment opportunities in the Philippinesi. TGFI started to formalize into a corporation with the objective of teaching financial literacy to Filipinos, particularly to the OFWs.
Aside from conducting big conferences, TGFI is also doing small coffee talks of a group of 20-50 people across the globe via the social media platform. TGFI offers free basic seminars on investing, but the modules on stock market with advanced formal and learning the fundaments of different companies already come with a fee. OFWs can subscribe to any of these modules for a fee starting ₱3,000 to ₱4,000 per subscription for webinar.
“We make this financial literacy advocacy as affordable as possible because our goal is to make people realize that they have to invest their earnings so they have to learn these investment tools,” Floi adds.
Floi, himself, has conducted and organized finance and business motivational seminars and events in different colleges and universities in the Philippines and headed more than 100 TGFI financial seminars in Singapore, Dubai, Cebu, Qatar, Brunei, Hong Kong, Cagayan De Oro, UK, and the Philippines. There are now a total of 27 existing TGFI communities all over the world.
Based on TGFI's survey, 30 percent of their around 10,000 members are already investing in the stock market, 40 percent in insurance, 20 percent in mutual funds and 5 percent in other alternative investments. Their investors range from 25-47 years old. Source: Manila Bulletin, January 7, 2020