Local high school students are getting a crash course in adult financial pressures through Pasadena Federal Credit Union’s “Bite of Reality” program, a simulation that assigns teens fictional life scenarios—including marriage, debt, and a six-month-old baby—and challenges them to make it through a month of expenses, without going broke.
The exercise unfolds like a financial obstacle course, much the way adult life often unfolds.
Students enter a room lined with tables, each representing a monthly expense category: housing, transportation, utilities, and entertainment. Armed with a scenario card detailing their fictional income, family status, and existing debt, the young participants must visit every station and make purchasing decisions that fit within their budget.
The catch? The “vendors” are trained to upsell.
“We instruct our vendors to upsell them, just like in real life,” said Ricardo Flores, Social Impact Manager at Pasadena Federal Credit Union. “Everybody’s trying to upsell you and try to get the most out of you. Well, that’s what they’re encouraged to do.”
When students overspend or “get into trouble,” they can always go to the credit union table—not for a bailout, but for education.
Counselors help them think about some of the purchases they made and understand where their budget went wrong.
“It’s a real eye-opening experience for the youth because they do get a sense of what us as parents and adults, the type of responsibilities that we face on a day-to-day, month-to-month basis,” Flores said.
The program, which predates Flores’s arrival at the credit union in March, reflects a broader institutional commitment at PFCU to financial education—particularly for populations that traditional banking has often overlooked.
The 90-year-old institution, serves more than 25,000 members, operates a branch inside John Muir High School and holds the Juntos Avanzamos designation from Inclusiv, a nationally recognized organization that works with over 500 credit unions across the country in helping them develop strategy, programs, and tools to help underserved, low-income, and immigrant communities.
CEO James Chang, who took the helm after PFCU’s 2024 merger with Pasadena Service Federal Credit Union, created the Social Impact Manager position specifically to scale these efforts. The decision signaled that community financial education wasn’t merely a marketing initiative — it was a strategic priority.
“They don’t just talk the talk, they walk the walk,” Flores said of the credit union’s leadership. “That’s what attracted me to come here.”
Measuring success in financial literacy work presents its own challenges. Unlike loan performance or deposit growth, the impact of teaching a teenager about compound interest may not manifest for years.
“It’s difficult because we don’t always get to see them after we work with them,” Flores acknowledged.
But the credit union has learned to recognize smaller victories: a young person coming in and wanting to open up their first savings account because they attended a workshop on the importance of saving, or an 18-year-old wanting to set up a secured credit card because they know that’s the best way to start establishing credit.
“The fact that they’ve gone through some of these programs—in the future, whenever they are faced, and let’s face it, we’re all faced with financial decisions almost on a daily basis, some bigger than others—eventually they’re going to have to make decisions that are going to have a long-lasting impact on their lives,” Flores said. “Having had that knowledge prior to having to make that decision is really key to helping them avoid some of the same mistakes that we all made growing up.”
The credit union’s philosophy distills to three words: engage, educate, inspire.
Engagement comes through partnerships with organizations like the YWCA of San Gabriel Valley, who in turn partnered with Pacific Clinics to put on the Breaking Barriers Youth Mental Health Conference in October. Education arrives through programs like Bite of Reality and a partnership with GreenPath, an organization that offers financial coaching and financial guidance. Inspiration, Flores said, means helping people take control of their finances and truly believe they can achieve their dreams, whatever they might be.
For a generation entering adulthood amid rising housing costs and student debt, such lessons may prove more valuable than any classroom lecture. In the controlled chaos of a Bite of Reality simulation—where a teenager learns that a nicer apartment means skipping entertainment for the month, or that an upsold car payment leaves nothing for emergencies—the abstract math of personal finance becomes viscerally real.
The vendors keep upselling. The budget keeps shrinking. And somewhere in that gap, a lesson takes hold.
