In the military, commanding officers can require their subordinates to attend financial education classes. Although service members may not always welcome the supervision, they do benefit from it. After all, civilians experience similar difficulties but do not have financial educators so close by – and even if civilians need financial help, they do not need to obey an order to get it.

Help: Too Late and a Stigma
However, the system has its flaws. First, service members often don't show signs of financial distress until their problems have become very serious – be it significant credit card debt or missed car payments. As such, financial counselors often don’t get to address problems when they are small and manageable.

Second, because so many service members who attend financial education classes are there because of financial mismanagement, it stigmatizes the classes and the locations where they are taught. Like being sent to the principal's office, others see it as being "in trouble."

Making House Calls
To overcome these challenges, Erica Brown, a community readiness technician at Shaw Air Force Base, decided to bring financial education to young airman on their own turf. To do so, she conducted an introductory class in the dorms. By making the house call, she could eliminate much of the embarrassment and discomfort that airmen perceived around going to the Airman and Family Readiness Center (AFRC) for a financial class. The workshop in the barracks would also reach young airmen who could use some proactive financial guidance, but who had not gotten to the point of financial crisis.

"Coming into the center is overwhelming for some airmen. They don't want to come and talk to people about their money, so I came up with the idea of doing a class at the dorms," says Brown. "I saw that this was an untapped demographic so I was just trying to tap into it."

Non-threatening Financial Education
To ensure she had attendance, Brown publicized the class well and also enlisted the help of the first sergeants who are responsible for the junior airmen. To get the buy-in of the sergeants, her message was simple: An ounce of prevention today may help your people before things get out of hand later on. In addition, airmen at Shaw accrue credits for attending classes that prepare them to live off-base, a common goal for young service members. By attending more classes, airmen can move off-base faster.

Brown's other key ingredient was making the one-hour session fun by using Money Habitudes cards. After all, she says, it would be hard to convince skeptical airmen that they should sit through a boring PowerPoint slideshow in their free time.

Aside from being an engaging, non-threatening way to introduce the financial assistance capabilities of the AFRC, Brown also saw that the educational game could help her identify what topics to focus on with the airmen.

"This is not me telling you where your money is going. This is your decisions, where you can see where your money is going. And if I can show you where your money is going, this is how I can help you," she explains.

Using Money Habitudes
Brown started the class with a short introduction of about five minutes on the role of Airman and Family Readiness and then did a brief overview of Money Habitudes. She then let the airmen sort the cards on their own which took another 10-15 minutes.

"I could verbalize, ´You need to save your money' or ´You need to stick to a budget,´ but until they actually do the cards and see exactly where their money is going – when they turn those cards over – it's an eye-opener to them because if you have a whole bunch of Status cards or a whole bunch of Spontaneous cards, I can explain it to them on their level."

After sorting the cards, Brown spent another few minutes going over the various Habitude types and how each affected people in the long-run. Because they'd already sorted the cards, the individual strengths and challenges for each type resonated with the airmen. And then, while she had their attention, Brown made sure to link the more casual barracks environment to getting more formal help at the AFRC.

"´If you need help with budgeting, if you're trying to save, let's get you an appointment now," she says, noting that a few of the participants did indeed make individual appointments on the spot.

Personalized Financial Education
Financial educators must often use a one-size-fits-all approach for three reasons. First, teaching is usually done in a group setting instead of one-to-one with personalized attention. Second, financial educators have limited time, both in terms of the number of instances they interact with students and the short timeframes they have to work in; many have only an hour or two for a class. Finally, as a result of the nature of quick, group classes, financial education materials tend to also be one-size-fits-all.

For example, many financial education classes jump right into what a budget is and how to tally up income and expenses. However, these general classes fail to help people understand their own individual strengths and challenges with regard to managing money. Using Money Habitudes, Brown found that she could make the class, its content and outcomes personal and relevant to each participant by helping them see their own patterns of how, why, where and when they were more likely to spend, save, give away and invest their money.

Connecting Life and Financial Education
When using Money Habitudes in her dorm class, Brown recalls one airman who revealed, after looking at his sorted cards, that he owned 120 pairs of shoes. And, of that collection, he had an almost religious devotion to Air Jordans, many of which cost hundreds of dollars. For a young enlisted man with a family, it was an expensive habit.

"The dialogue was so needed," says Brown, who adds that she didn't have to take a judgmental, "bad cop" role to start the conversation. In fact, not only did he see his own challenge, but his fellow airmen also coached him and supported him in changing this behavior because he had identified a concrete issue and felt comfortable talking about it. This pattern of using money to feel good about one's self may be echoed among others in the group, be it someone who spends a week's pay on one outfit or others who put nearly all of their take-home into a vehicle they cannot really afford.

"It actually became a peer learning environment," she says.

Brown doubts the airman would have hit upon this specific personal insight – and the larger spending patterns it represented – without Money Habitudes. And, of course, it was only because Brown had gone to the dorm and reached him with a non-threatening and proactive activity that he was able to see and address this issue. Without Brown's outreach, he might have waited months or years before being required to get financial help or working up the courage to go to the AFRC.

"You can't change anybody's mindset," says Brown, "but you can give them ideas to change."