For more than 15 years, Madeleine Greene worked as a financial counselor and educator for Cooperative Extension Service through the University of Maryland, which included an eight-year partnership program with Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Greene is an accredited financial counselor who is certified in family and consumer science.

Now a contractor for the Department of Defense, she provides financial education on military bases in the greater Washington, D.C. area as well as nationally.

As a Personal Financial Counselor, she works with various on-base constituents, including Army Community Service, Fleet and Family Support, and Airman and Family Readiness. Her audience is service members and spouses between the ages of 19 and 30.

She is tasked with supporting the military's mission to train service members not just for the battlefield but for the home front as well. As such, financial education plays an important role in the general effectiveness of those serving in the military.

"To be mission-ready, you have to be financially ready. You can't be distracted. If you're handling volatile material, you can't have your mind wander," says Greene, who adds that people's feeling of financial security affects their life and career focus, even when it’s not a life-and-death situation.

Those who participate in the financial education classes which Greene facilitates are generally there for one of two reasons. Either they are motivated to be better educated about the topic and decided to proactively attend or they are reacting to financial difficulties and are often required to attend by a commanding officer. The classes usually have two dozen students and cover why it is important to focus on and understand money, basic budgeting, military benefits, savings and the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), credit use and evaluation, getting out of debt, major purchases, insurance, record-keeping and retirement.

Greene finds that Money Habitudes – she uses the original, adult version as well as the Money Habitudes II version for 18-25-year-olds – is a versatile tool for these classes: "I always take the cards with me because, invariably, I can make them work in the situation I find myself in."

She usually prepares to use Money Habitudes cards as the first exercise in her day-long classes. It serves as an introduction to what will follow and captures the audience – even those who are not there of their own choosing – by getting them involved and interested in the subject.

"Too often I think that people jump right in with the body of material they want to present, but [first] you need some method to get people to be with you because then they're going to hear you better and they're going to engage with the material. People learn best when they are involved in their learning. Through the cards they do, reflect and hopefully apply the very personal prescriptive results," says Green.

"I use the cards to make sure that I get their attention because I think the cards are a fabulous way to have individuals work it out for themselves."

Beyond the hands-on engagement the cards offer, Greene finds that they help people put the other topics in context. Understanding one's Habitudes then frames other aspects of financial well-being regarding spending or saving smarter, investing, going into debt, giving to charity and the like. This is especially important with an audience that often lacks financial life experience and good financial role models.

"I like to say to them, 'OK, you're here. They [the military] have said, 'Use these eight hours to talk about money.' I don't know you. You don't know me, but I want you to know that I'm here to be of service to you and I think these cards will help you understand and process a lot of the information that I have to share with you today. How you're going to listen, how you're going to hear, how you're going to process is subliminally influenced by what has happened to you.'"

Part of the reason that the cards work, says Greene, is because participants find value in the insights they provide – and that they accurately capture people's strengths and challenges around dealing with money.

"The thing that I love about using the cards is a comment I have heard over and over and over again: 'Oh, did they get me right!' or 'I can't believe how accurate this is!'"

Greene has lots of personal success stories from her years of financial education. One of her favorite breakthroughs came when two married service members were in the same class and did the Money Habitudes card sort together. As they read the statement cards and sorted them, they interacted.

"He kept looking at how she was putting her cards down and he kept saying to her, 'That's not the truth. Tell the truth.' The rest of the class was amused, but in my heart, I knew it wasn't that amusing because it was a reality check," says Greene. "After the class was over, they came up to me – I remember this vividly – and said, 'This has been a fabulous experience!' I have to believe that it started with the very first activity: using the cards and getting real with each other."

One of the keys to Greene's financial education classes is her insistence that people feel that they can share their experiences without embarrassment or shame and ask questions freely. This creates an open, trusting atmosphere. After the class sorts their Money Habitudes cards, she takes a tally where people share their different dominant Habitudes. This low-risk exercise to share something personal and financial underscores that people are different and that they come from different places when it comes to money.

"I think the fundamental thing is we've got to get to the real reason why people are using money the way they do," says Greene, "and that's what these cards do."