Best-selling personal-finance software enhances financial-literacy program

USA Funds to offer Quicken with its Life Skills program

INDIANAPOLIS — USA Funds^®, the nation's leading education-loan guarantor, announces that Life Skills^SM, its popular financial-literacy program for college students, has been enhanced with the addition of Quicken^®, the best-selling personal-finance software. Through an agreement with Intuit Inc., a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for consumers, businesses and accounting professionals, USA Funds now is packaging free copies of Quicken 2003 New User Edition for Windows with copies of Life Skills Module 1, "Get a Grip on Your Finances: Smart Spending for Students."

"The addition of Quicken software will help students put into practice important lessons about budgeting and smart spending that they'll learn through Life Skills," said Carl C. Dalstrom, USA Funds president and CEO. "We believe this enhancement will help students better manage their finances while they are on campus as well as following graduation."

Offered nationwide since spring 2002, Life Skills is a flexible training program that equips postsecondary institutions to teach their students to budget their time and money. Nearly 300 colleges, universities and career schools are at various stages of implementing Life Skills on their campuses.

Life Skills teaches basic strategies for managing finances and for completing degree work in a timely manner. The course also supports efforts by financial-aid professionals to be good stewards of their institutions' education-loan default rates.

Life Skills features five independent but interrelated sessions. Each module includes an instructor's training manual, a student skills book, presentation slides, a video and an interactive CD-ROM with student skill-building activities. For additional information, view Life Skills on the USA Funds Web site.

Life Skills is part of a multi-million-dollar initiative launched by USA Funds in 1999 to help postsecondary institutions achieve measurable reductions in their student-loan default rates. USA Funds offers the free program to its customers, to all minority-serving postsecondary institutions, and to all schools in the eight states that USA Funds serves as the designated guarantor of federal education loans. USA Funds is the designated guarantor in Arizona, Hawaii and the Pacific Islands, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Nevada and Wyoming.