By: Victoria Araj

Is it possible to have a 3-bedroom home, a sports car and a 10-day vacation planned on a $3000 monthly budget? 

Questions like this gave 40 students from the Boys & Girls Club of Flint a few hours to scratch their heads and come up with an answer.  With all of the financial news in the media, local kids are learning about money a lot earlier in life thanks to the Rock Financial Junior Achievement Park in Detroit.   Kids are like sponges, they soak up all kinds of information by learning from their environment and from example.  They can learn first-hand how to manage money, balance a budget, and ultimately be a savvy financial consumer with the right tools and resources.  On Saturday, volunteers from Quicken Loans/Rock did just that by helping the students plan a simulated monthly budget.

Finance Park has a really cool set up for the students with stations that recreate offices and storefronts that reflect real-life choices.  The students were given a life scenario, which indicated whether they were single, married, with or without children and the monthly income they had to pay their bills and save.  From obtaining a mortgage, to securing insurance to buying monthly groceries, the students had to make decisions about their expenses and not be in the red at completion.  This was quite a task for the students as they picked out a house, furniture and even cell phone plans that seemed perfect on paper but when matched with their monthly income…not so realistic.  Some of the students had to make changes by buying a cheaper car or sacrificing high-speed internet in order to balance their budgets.  It sure was an eye opener as several of the students commented that they did not realize how many decisions their parents face and how they will appreciate being a kid for a while longer!

This was a great experience because it gave the students a glimpse of the responsibilities that come along with adulthood long before they are faced with them in reality.  The kids walked away with an understanding of needs versus wants and the value of planning ahead instead of spending frivolously.  All of the volunteers had a great time helping the students and are looking forward to the next opportunity to do it again!  Quicken Loans team member Sherry Wong said, “It allowed us to take everyday expenses and inspire children to think of how to manage their financial future. It was such a fun morning, and you could tell the kids learned a lot from it.”

By Todd Albery

Man, Detroit can’t catch a break.  Every year Detroit plans its big Winter Blast, and every year it’s either bitter cold or unseasonably warm!  This year was no exception.  Out of the blue, last weekend we go from 30+ straight-days of beautiful cool, snowy, Michigan Winter to… WARM.  Ice sculptures melting, buckets of snow being thrown on the sledding hill, warming stations vacant, and an inch of water on the Campus Martius ice skating rink (which my son actually thought was the greatest slip-n-slide ever!).

Despite the last-minute climate change, my family had an absolute BLAST down in Detroit this weekend!  Crowds were great, people were friendly and the event was well organized.  Rides were operating, lines were moving and my two kids couldn’t get enough of the fun.  My son and I raced down a crazy-fast 50-foot sledding hill (he’s still bragging about beating me).  My daughter took a dream- pony-ride through the snow.  We ice-skated to live DJ music.  We posed with Santa’s reindeer, Dancer, who was kind enough to fly over for the event.  We watched a Reggae Band (while the kids hoola-hooped) inside the Compuware building.  Then we finished the day off with some roasted marshmallows & s’mores, compliments  of Quicken Loans (please disregard the pink backpack  – it’s a Dad thing)

Detroit did another fantastic job this year of creating a fun family experience in spite of the Michigan weather.  It was a great day to celebrate a Winter in Detroit… It was also a great day to sport a Quizzle t-shirt and celebrate the one-year birthday of a new project called Quizzle!

Thanks to Detroit and Quicken Loans for providing my family with the BLAST of fun memories in winter ’09!

By Vicki Gladstone

My name is Vicki Gladstone and I’m a Partner Manager on the Quicken Loans marketing team. My husband Rob and I volunteered for the Lighthouse Holiday Drive at the All Saints Episcopal Church in Pontiac on Saturday December 13, 2008.

What an amazing event!  Despite the downward economy and the continuing financial struggles within the Metro Detroit area, I was truly amazed at the outpouring of generosity and volunteerism.  This event depicted what the holiday season is all about:  Being thankful for what you have in your life and giving to others who are in need.

by Victoria Araj

On Saturday, several Quicken Loans team members made their way to the Gleaners Food Bank in Taylor.  Carrie Cabrera brought her son and Jennifer Jones brought her uncle to help and be honorary team members for a day! When we arrived, we were excited to see that there were volunteers from other organizations as well as a local family that visits on occasion to help whenever they can. 

We broke up in groups and sorted bins of food and placed them in boxes according to date. Our Quicken Loans team decided to form an assembly-line process which the other groups emulated-- this allowed us to really make a difference in the time we were there.  Some of the other groups had young children with them and they hopped into the bins to hand us the food! 

By: W Kemp

A couple of weeks ago I attended an event that I had been working on with the Boys and Girls Club of Flint since early spring. An event that would honor our President and COO, Patrick McInnis, with the Boys and Girls Club of Flint’s Community Hero Award. All of us that work with Patrick know that he is a hero, but how great it was to see him recognized in the community where he grew up for making a difference in the lives of others.

By W Kemp

This is strictly my opinion, but flowers can brighten up a room or an outside area with their vibrant color and the way they dance when the wind hits them just right. When flowers bloom or are added outside it lets you know the dreary days of winter are gone and it’s time to head outdoors for some fun in the sun.
For several years, Quicken Loans/Rock Financial/Title Source have been involved with a non-profit called JARC. This organization is dedicated to helping people with disabilities live full, dignified lives while providing support to their families.

A couple of weeks ago more than a dozen Community DIFF volunteers headed out to one of the twenty JARC group homes to help them with their annual Flower-a-thon. What is a Flower-a-thon? Well,  it is just what it sounds like…a volunteer event that allows pros and novice to plant flowers, vegetables, assist with weeding and other gardening chores that will give the home that wonderful spring time look and feel.

....11 QL Team members comprised of Quicken/Rock Financial, Fathead and Title source volunteers in a sea of other like-minded volunteers; students, individuals and companies armed with shovels, pick axes, and wheel barrels – all of us getting instructions on how to plant a tree from the Greening of Detroit Experts, incredible people whose life work is keeping the earth green, literally one tree at a time. 

Too our surprise, there is more to planting a tree than just planting a tree, there’s the hole; man-made is better than machine-made and these holes are wide and deep! Picture standing in one up to your thigh.  Then there’s the tree – between 12 and 15 feet tall with their roots bundled in burlap and weighing a hundred pounds or more each – you cannot move these things by yourself, there’s the sod to be placed around the tree once it’s planted grass-side down so as not to compete for the nutrients the tree will need in its infant stage and then the 3 buckets of 15 gallons of water to get the little one feeding; then the cedar to cover it like a warm blanket…it takes a team of people who know what they are doing – thanks to our crash course – we were up for the job. 

By J Christe

Have you ever wanted to make a difference in someone’s life and have fun at the same time?

I had that opportunity last weekend while serving dinner at Grace Centers of Hope in Pontiac, Michigan along with team members from Rock Financial/Quicken Loans & Title Source. I also brought along my daughter Christina and my friend Mr. Love. It happens to be our favorite place to volunteer.

By C Linder

This past weekend I had the pleasure of volunteering my time with my fellow Quicken Loans/Rock Financial/Title Source team members at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The event was the Maple Fest which was a two-day kids event put on by the center, and is run primarily by volunteers. Sometimes it is so easy to get caught up in the demands of everyday life and it feels great to volunteer your time to help others in need to bring you back down to earth. This is what I was seeking through this opportunity- and it also helped that I am a complete science nerd.

I was somewhat disappointed that it happened to be yet another freezing, windy, snowy day in Michigan because some of the kids were going to go outside to participate in activities- and I unfortunately was missing gloves and a hat. This prevented me from being able to volunteer outside, which was my original plan. I thought it was inspiring, however, that they still took groups of kids outside to learn about making maple syrup and tapping it from the trees.

By M. Dunklee

Quicken Loans/Rock Financial, the Detroit Pistons and the Detroit Shock pulled into the final stop of our “Know Your Black History” tour on February 25. For the second year in a row, we ended the tour in Flint, Mich., inviting several area high schools to come, be educated, be entertained, support their respective classmates, and, for one lucky student, win a $1,000 scholarship, courtesy of Quicken Loans/Rock Financial.

The goal of the tour is to educate the students about the tragic story of slavery, the quest for freedom and equality, and the perseverance and amazing contributions of great African Americans throughout their tumultuous journey through history. But those of us who participated in the tour as competition judges received a valuable education as well.

Let me come clean with the facts: I’m a white male, raised in a middle class, mostly white suburb by white parents raised in middle class, almost entirely white suburbs.