Michael Vick visits Ypsilanti as a brand ambassador for the local credit repair company’s youth academy

When former NFL football star Michael Vick first walked onto the Virginia Tech campus as a freshman, he fell prey to salesmen selling low-limit credit cards . He signed up for one without understanding exactly how they worked and ended up with an extremely low credit score.

“I had never been taught financial literacy and didn’t even know how to pay the card,” Vick says.

Vick’s experience of not understanding how credit works or how to improve your credit score led him to accept a role as a brand ambassador for the Ypsilanti-based company. Bad credit is childish (BCIC), an extension of credit repair company Ypsilanti Time Travel Credit Repair. BCIC is launching a financial literacy program for young people called Bad Credit Is Childish Academy.

Vick visited Ypsilanti Community High School and Cass Technical High School in Detroit on the morning of December 2 to speak to high school students about the importance of financial literacy.

As adults, Ypsilanti residents and high school friends Willie Johnson and Lynwood Powell found themselves talking about their bad credit and what they could do about it. This led them to found Time Travel Credit Repair and BCIC, as well as the new BCIC Academy.

“We’ve been doing credit restoration for a while, but we wanted to do something strictly to help kids,” Powell said. “We understand that kids don’t have credit, so no repairs are needed, but we can teach them how to build credit. A lot of kids don’t know how things end up on a credit report. We want to help them avoid these [pitfalls] and help them not to make the same mistakes we made in the past.”

Johnson says the academy starts with a focus on budgeting and teaches young people responsibility and accountability. Young people attending the academy will receive a broad education in finance and money, including NFTs and cryptocurrency.

Johnson says most young people they talk to don’t know what a credit score is, but once they do, they want to know more.

“They want to figure out how to achieve the things everyone else wants to achieve, so we give them a game plan,” Johnson said. “They have to first understand what credit is and then how to manage it. From there, they can use it to get whatever they want, whether it’s a house, a car, or starting a business. company.”

Vick says he and other student-athletes had no financial education. He thinks up to 70% of NFL players have bad credit because, although they have a lot of money, they don’t know how to manage it.

Vick says he thinks financial literacy should be a required high school course.

“It’s as important as a foreign language or algebra. It’s something we need to pass on to future generations,” says Vick.

More information about BCIC Academy can be found here.

Sarah Rigg is a freelance writer and editor in Ypsilanti Township and project manager of On the Ypsilanti field. She joined Concentrate as a news editor in early 2017 and occasionally contributes to other Broadcast Media Group editions. You can reach her at sarahrigg1@gmail.com.

Photos by Sarah Rigg.