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Financial Literacy Curriculum: Introduction |
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Congratulations on considering family and marriage education as part of your Individual Development Account (IDA) financial education training! As an IDA trainer, you have the rewarding job of helping individuals and families gain the knowledge and build the skills they need to achieve financial self-sufficiency. This Resource Book is designed for IDA financial education practitioners working with IDA savers who share their financial lives with a partner or family. It contains tools you can use with IDA savers to enhance their communication skills about money-and to work together with their partners, families, and communities to achieve their financial goals.
About the IDA Family Strengthening Initiative
"The IDA training is often the first time couples start working as a team to improve their finances. They learn to negotiate, compromise and give affirmation to their partner for their ideas. It's a very dramatic way of helping families survive." IDA Trainer from Nashville - Tennessee
Partnering IDAs and family education activities is a powerful strategy to promote family money management and money harmony. Most adults in America marry or live with a partner and share financial responsibilities and decision-making about money matters during their lifetime. Many of these people have children. For most, financial issues are a primary source of household conflict. Money issues are often intensified in low-income families served by IDAs, where making ends meet day-to-day is a struggle. IDA practitioners are familiar with the kinds of family and economic issues that impact IDA savers' abilities to reach their goals. IDA is a ready access point for providing financial-related family education services!
Family and marriage education can provide you with the tools to help families confidently:
- Explore their values and perspectives about money.
- Work to resolve potential sources of friction.
- Succeed at managing their family finances and budgets.
- Save in the IDA program and purchase their asset.
OCS launched the IDA Family Strengthening Initiative to encourage IDA practitioners to integrate family strengthening and marriage education components into their IDA project. In The Guidebook for Integrating IDA with Family Strengthening and Marriage Education, two strategies were presented: Education and Partnership. This Resource Book provides IDA practitioners with concrete ideas and tools for implementing the education strategy. Combining financial literacy training with relationship skills building activities can help individuals strengthen their partnerships, marriages, families, and communities.
How the Resource Book Differs from other IDA Curricula
This Resource Book is a compilation of family and couple-focused activities that set the core financial literacy skills-asset development, goal-setting, budgeting, saving, banking, credit, investment, etc.-in a relationship-based context. While the chapters of the Resource Book follow the topics commonly found in IDA financial education programs, this compendium does not offer explanations of the basic concepts of money management in a sequential format. Many excellent financial education curricula exist that do. However, we know that most IDA practitioners use a training program that is a composite of concepts, discussions, exercises and activities from many different resources. IDA trainers continually spend time developing and refining financial literacy training programs to meet their clients' needs. Therefore, we have created a Resource Book that offers a collection of new ideas and activities from which you can select to augment the financial education training that you have designed.
Activities throughout the compendium offer a variety of perspectives, methodologies, strategies, and philosophies. The activities target audiences of different ages, literacy levels, life stages, and backgrounds. Each activity offers a different opportunity to explore a financial concept within a family or couple relationship.
Goal of the Resource Book
This book provides IDA practitioners with resources to integrate family and marriage education with their financial education programs. Most IDA classes are currently comprised of individuals from each family. Therefore, many of the activities in the book are designed to help individuals learn new insights about their relationships and improve family money management practices and communication. Other activities, while designed for families, can also work well as small group activities in which class members play the roles of different family members. And some of the activities simply work best with a couple or family. In such cases, trainers can encourage class participants to do these activities at home with their families and report back on these home experiences. Within many activities we have inserted a "Note to Trainer" section that describes the class setting and composition most amenable for the activity. Of course, creative trainers will probably find many more uses!
Another goal of this book is that an IDA trainer may be inspired by one or more of the activities and offer special family or couple workshops to emphasize the importance of families working together toward their financial goals.
For those organizations interested in fully integrating marriage or family education activities, this Resource Book is also designed to highlight the work of six family and marriage education platforms-Better Together, Money Harmony, PAIRS, Power of Two, PREP, and Survival Skills for Healthy Families. Each platform offers "training of trainers" programs in marriage and family education. So, if you find an activity or methodology you particularly like, look up the author in the Appendix of Contributors.
About the Resource Book
The Activities in this Resource Book are grouped into eight chapters. Chapters 2 through 8 echo the sequence of many financial education programs: asset development, values toward money, goal-setting, budgeting, savings, banking and investment, and credit.
Chapter 1, Money Talk, is a special chapter that addresses how people within a family interact about money. This chapter provides valuable tools and resources to help class participants discuss and work better together with their partners and children. The communication activities set a stage of skills in communicating respect and caring that serve as a basis for the rest of the Resource Book (and for life!)
Chapter 2, Family Assets, demonstrates the importance of asset accumulation over the generations and helps families join together to identify and celebrate the assets within their family.
Chapter 3, Money Values and Attitudes, explores important money styles, money attitudes and how these attitudes are formed. Activities also open the door to sharing money experiences and histories abut the meanings we attach to money.
Chapter 4, Family Dreams and Goals, encourages families to set goals together by prioritizing and clarifying their objectives.
Chapter 5, Family Budgeting, helps families make spending and saving choices based on their combined values, goals and available resources.
Chapter 6, Family Savings, provides families with strategies to spend less and save more!
Chapter 7, Banking and Investment, facilitates discussion on banking services and financial issues such as choosing financial institutions, understanding their products and avoiding financial traps.
Chapter 8, Credit and Debt, addresses the risks and responsibilities of joint credit while helping families set guiding principles to help them manage their debt.
As discussed above, the activities within each chapter are not a step-by-step sequence of learning, but rather an offering of ways that couples and families can explore the outlined topics together. Sometimes two activities are similar, at least in part. They are included because there is enough difference in style, methodology, length or complexity to merit inclusion. Other times you might see ways to pair activities. You might find that applying a skill or concept from one activity enhances another. We have noted some of these compatibilities in the "Note to Trainer" section included in most activities.
Using the Resource Book
As you are well aware, financial literacy and money management training often address very sensitive topics for the people that you serve. Adding marriage education and family strengthening could feel even more intrusive and personal for your clients if not approached thoughtfully. Good preparation is often the key to a successful training.
Please take time to peruse the Resource Book and develop a general sense of its content. As you read through each activity, you might want to make notes on the Table of Contents as to where it might fit into your curriculum. This can serve as a handy reference later to refresh your memory about the many possible activities.
If you would like to use an activity in your training program, we just ask that any use or reproduction includes reference to the author. We have included an appropriate footnote on each activity and again on each worksheet to facilitate this.
When you plan to incorporate an activity into your training program, it is always a good idea to do the activity ahead of time, either on your own or-even better-with your partner or family members! This helps you:
- experience some of the emotions your clients may feel.
- improve the bonds of trust between you and your students when you say "When I did this, I found that." or "It was hard for me to ., but in the end it was really worth it."
- recognize where additional information or explanation might be necessary for your particular clients.
- take the time to adapt activities, examples or language to better suit your specific audience.
- answer questions about how to do the various parts of the activity.
- be better prepared to handle expressions of confusion, reluctance, and anxiety.