Standard Packages: Money Essentials™

This programme teaches low income adults with secondary school education level to control their expenses, get out of debt, set up short and long term goals, and save for them, anticipate expenses, make a budget and decide on priorities.

The programme consists of five independent sessions with ten to twelve activities each, so a total of around 15 hours of training. Each module has a main topic: spending, borrowing, earning, saving and planning, and can be taught in the order of the Trainer's Guide or combined differently to suit participants' learning goals, available time and level of attention. Trainers can also arrange an introduction sessions followed by review sessions.

It is available in English and French. For other languages, please contact us.

What is the difference between Money Basics™ and Money Essentials™ ?

Money Essentials™ targets urban and suburban adults who have attended secondary school while Money Basics™ targets rural population, and population with primary school education or under. What does that imply?

Examples of stories are different,
Money Essentials™ requires a higher level of maths (four operations and percentage): for example Money Basics™ uses toy banknotes to explain how to save while Money Essentials goes straight to numbers and divisions,
Money Basics™ deals with the relative low presence of bank or structured financial services like insurance in rural areas,
Money Essentials™ deals with written bills and other paper documents,
Money Essentials™ uses more words and assumes participants can read and write their mother tongue.

Learning objectives:

Explore the different types of expenses, how to control them, how to track expenses and analyse shopping behaviour,
Understand debts and interest rates, how to discuss and negotiate a loan, evaluate the consequences of havving too much debt and find practical ways to get out of debt,
Identify the various ways to get an income, how to manage irregular income, how to increase income, calculate a profit and return on an income generating expense, and explore ways to grow skills, analyse what a scam is, understand the basics of insurance and how to keep financial records
Identify the main reasons to save, set financial goals and determine saving needs accordingly, how to find the motivation to save, how to manage risks and keep savings in a safe place, how to deal with inflation
Experience the importance of planning and anticipating, how to budget expenses and income, address the difficulties of saving and budgeting, how to talk with one's spouse about money, give children good money habits and deal with extended family money issues.
Introduce some fundamental investment concepts such as liquidity, risk and yield and asset allocation

Training Methods:

Money Essentials™ is highly interactive: modules are divided into 20 to 40 minutes activities with stories, posters, cards, etc... Calculations are kept to a minimum and exercises are done in teams. Each exercise is related to the issues raised in the story and is as practical and realistic as possible. Exercises are corrected during the training.

The participants are given a handout with blank spreadsheet to help them implement the main learnings of the programme to their own finance. Posters are available for revisions.

How to get Money Essentials™ programme?

Money Essentials™ is available through our Training the Trainers workshop. During the workshop, participants get familiar with Money Essentials™ trainers' guide, watch one class demonstration, work in group to adapt one activity and train to teach it in front of the other trainers.

After the workshop, participants get a free access to our Resource Centre where all training props and materials are available in Word or Excel documents and several languages so that they can print them, get the latest updates or download them to adapt them to their own clients' learning goals.

Example of instruction and material

Money Essentials - Sisophon (Cambodia) May 2007