All My Money

A Financial Management Curriculum for Persons Working with Limited-Resource Audiences

All My Money is a train-the-trainer curriculum for persons working with limited-resource audiences. The program is designed to assist staff and volunteers in community agencies and social service organizations who work directly with limited-resource clientele. Details and ordering information follow.

There are eight lessons: (1) Making Spending Choices, (2) Envelope Budgeting, (3) Planning Your Spending, (4) Understanding Credit, (5) Handling Credit Problems, (6) Building Consumer Skills, (7) Taking Consumer Action, and (8) Checks and Checking Accounts. Each lesson is organized to help the trainer teach the lesson in the easiest way possible.

The CONTENTS at the beginning of each lesson guides the trainer through the materials.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION gives the trainer useful information to review prior to teaching the lesson.

The OVERVIEW contains the lesson objectives, a trainer's checklist of things to do prior to teaching and a lesson guide showing the topic, teaching method, and materials needed.

The LESSON PLAN gives instructions for teaching the lesson, with placement of activities indicated. Black and white masters of all handouts for photocopying are included in a separate appendix. The notebook contains the curriculum and handout masters in plastic protector sheets.

A separate RESOURCE BOX contains additional teaching materials to complete the hands-on activities, such as: play money, expense category stickers to put on envelopes for the envelope budgeting lesson, etc. Evaluation instruments are included.

Each lesson is designed to stand-alone or to be taught as part of the series. Hands-on activities and experiential learning are key elements of this curriculum. Successful money management is best learned by doing.

Unique aspects of this curriculum are the easy-to-use organization, black and white masters of all handouts as well as masters for the additional teaching materials should these be used up, and realistic activities. An example of the latter are the handouts for checks, checkbook registers, bank statements, and deposit slips in Lesson 8, Checks and Checking Accounts. These are all designed to look like the "real" items.

Todo Mi Dinero is the Spanish supplement for the All My Money curriculum. It contains Spanish versions of all of the All My Money materials used by the client.

All My Money was developed by members of the Consumer and Family Economics Team at the University of Illinois Extension. The curriculum was adapted from the Washington State Cooperative Extension Service Program, Money Management Advisors. As with all University of Illinois Extension program materials, All My Money is research-based. In particular, a needs assessment of social service organizations and community agencies guided selection of topics and method of delivery.

For more information about this curriculum, please see All My Money Fact Sheet or the Todo Mi Dinero Fact Sheet. The fact sheets are in PDF format. To read PDF documents, you need the Adobe Reader. You can download the latest version of the FREE Reader directly from Adobe's website.

To purchase this curriculum, please see All My Money Ordering Information.

Reviewed and updated as of November 2006

E-mail:

Consumer and Family Economics
Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics
University of Illinois Extension
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign