📈 Chatt Brick & Mortar Coming Soon!
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BetterFi Winter 2024 Field Report & Updates
BetterFi is a 501(c)3 economic justice enterprise and CDFI dedicated to transforming consumer credit in Tennessee to be more fair, more accessible, and a pathway out of predatory lending. More at www.betterfi.co.
Happy Holidays, everyone!
Apologies that I have not sent an update in a while, but we have a lot of exciting news and updates to share. A few of the highlights are below.
🧱 Hamilton Co. Brick & Mortar
Thanks to a transformational grant from the Robert F. Stone Foundation in Chattanooga, BetterFi is now preparing to open a brick-and-mortar location in Hamilton County in an attempt to increase the volume of our impact.
We are targeting a Q1 '25 opening and will soon be hiring for staff at this location, so please watch our job board or reach out if you know of a good candidate! We will be reaching out to applicants to previous positions soon.
🛟 Savings + Credit Building
We've heard again and again for a way for people to build credit and have hesitated to offer credit for that reason alone, but we are excited to announce that our Savings + Credit Builder program is now live.
Clients will be able to build toward savings goals of $500, $1,000, or $1,500 over 5 or 10 months and benefit from those payments being reported to the credit bureaus to build credit history. Since our clients will receive their funds after reaching savings milestones, we are able to drastically expedite the underwriting process.
💸 More to Lend
With expanding geographies and expanding programs, we also have an expanding need for programmatic investments to capitalize our loan fund and allow us to disburse more credit.
We are proud to announce that Credit Builders Alliance and Millennium Bank are the first to extend credit to us to fuel our programs, increasing the amount of credit we can extend to the underserved while allowing us to focus grant funds and donations on improving and extending our operations.
🤝 Where We Need Your Help
Starting next year, we will begin implementing an integration with Plaid to minimize the need for applicants to deal with getting us downloaded or physical bank statements for review.
The integration will speed up our application process, provide BetterFi with more and more reliable data, and will enable BetterFi to provide far more effective and accurate personal cashflow insights to coaching clients.
This will save money in the long run, but costs money up front. We have a donor willing to match up to $10,000 toward our expenses related to Plaid – please consider contributing to this big increase in our capacity.
As always, thank you for your support and partnership – we have achieved an incredible amount for the hundreds of people that we have served, but we have an even more incredible amount of work ahead of us.
Spike
Executive Director
BetterFi
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