I recently prepared an activity for scouts to earn the “Budgeting” badge with my daughter’s Girl Scout troop. They’re 9-10 and I appreciated the challenge of getting into enough detail to make it meaningful, without going into advanced mechanics.

There’s a suggested set of activities listed on the Girl Scouts website, which I borrowed from, but I felt it was really important to make sure that investing was included as a topic (which wasn’t in the suggestions). We covered save/spend/share/invest, then I had some worksheets with different characters that the girls could help with their budget, including some wants and needs, what they care about (informing the share/giving category) as well as bigger goals where saving and investing made sense.

Regardless of how little or much I’ve had to invest, one of the key factors is to make it automatic instead of being a decision to make. The category is there and isn’t just for what’s “left over” at the end of the month (because too often nothing will be).

I was hoping that having them “help” someone it would anchor the concepts and we’d get less stuck on the particulars of their own current personal financial situation. I had little appetite to prompt the sharing of things like allowance/lack thereof.

It was cool seeing the scouts all planning out the budget, then talking about “why” they made the choices they did. It was also fun to create some characters/motivations for the activity…brings back good memories of creating RPG characters.