First Financial Security, Inc. is excited to announce that the Give Back Visionary of the Year Award for 2023 goes to Youa Khang of Sacramento, California!
FFS introduced the award this year to honor agents who impact their community through charity, volunteer work, financial education and other efforts that go above and beyond their duty to help people. These visionaries are chosen from a pool of agents, nominated by their peers, who have gone to great lengths to help fulfill the FFS vision of a world where all people have financial security and peace of mind.
The nominations we received for Youa all told the same incredible stories: how she’s been a CFEI for eight years and exemplifies having a servant's heart; how she was appointed vice president of The Saving Angels, a non-profit advocating for the importance of financial literacy; how, over the past year, she’s spent more that 50 hours of her personal time teaching finance through one-on-one classes. During the pandemic, she led monthly Zoom classes to ensure students were still getting financial literacy resources, and she’s helped organize and raise funds for a financial literacy scholarship for two consecutive years.
Her impact on her students cannot be overstated:
- One student paid off $8,000 in student loans.
- Another college student saved $10,000 and grew their credit from zero to a FICO score of 760 points, all while taking classes full time and working a part-time job.
- One student saved $1,000 in emergency funds — the first time that student had that much money in her bank account.
- Another student changed her entire perspective and relationship to money after working with Youa on financial psychology, transforming the negative associations she grew up with into positive attitudes that she passed down to her children.
Youa has also dedicated countless hours to researching and helping FFS create a Real Secrets of Money program for financial literacy called “The Psychology of Money." This is what she is most passionate about — a passion that has led her to pursuing education to become a certified financial therapist. With this certification, she plans to offer free financial consultations for her community as part of her financial literacy work in the future.
Congratulations on winning the Give Back Visionary of the Year Award, Youa Khang!