Savings Game is a highly interactive training tool for private households, young people and small family businesses that wish to learn the art of efficient family budget management and savings mobilisation.
Objectives of interactive training:
- Understand important concepts such as inflation, safety and liquidity.
- Get an understanding of the meaning of a household budget and other important components such as income and costs.
- Define, manage and analyse personal and family budgets.
- Obtain the ability to identify and manage current and future needs and wants as well as to plan and provide for potential current and future life risks.
- Understand the purpose and benefits of savings.
- Understand the differences between savings in a financial institution and other ways of saving.
- Obtain the ability to identify and select a sound financial institution.
Setup of the Savings Game:
In the haptic board simulation Savings Game, participants take part in a three-round learning experience that will prove to be both challenging and rewarding. They form teams and manage a family’s budget. The individual family group tries to outperform similar households in terms of financial literacy and savings – in order to reach the highest quality of life score.
As family members, participants make up their daily choices while going through the various important stages of life: growing up and going to school, getting married, caring for a child and for the older family members. Whenever a family has different interests, it is up to the family as a group to decide what is best in order to increase the quality of life of the entire family.
Lessons learned:
- Increase financial knowledge in drawing up and keeping a household budget and being more aware of the benefits of long-term budget planning.
- Get to know macroeconomic concepts such as inflation and purchasing power.
- Learn about the benefits and purpose of saving vs. the purpose and benefits of a credit.
- Become aware of the role of financial institutions for the individual customer and the economy and understand how to select a sound financial institution and suitable financial services.
- Together with experienced trainers, complex situations are analyzed, decision options and best solutions are actively discussed in groups and being set against real life practice.
Training of trainers:
The general approach to rolling out this training follows this sequence:
- A training for local multipliers (“training of trainers”) is performed by experienced international trainers.
- The ToT is followed by an application of the training material in practice where trainers form teams of two multipliers to lead the first courses for private households, young adults and small family-run businesses.
- The local multipliers attend a workshop for advanced trainers to exchange their experience as trainers and a follow-up training session, at the end of which a special trainer certificate is handed over to each trainer.
The experience-based learning approach:
The overall objective of the Savings Game is to experience how to manage a household budget and to accumulate savings effectively, applying an experience-based approach.
The learning process is characterised by four phases:
- The participants are subdivided into groups, each group assumes the role of a family of five members and takes important decisions on income generation, expenditures, handles individual family members’ needs and wants as well as life risk events and decisions on savings accumulation (Do).
- The participants receive feedback and reflect their progress within the simulation as well as their own actions (Reflect).
- The participants apply their newly acquired knowledge during the training (Apply).
- In transfer sessions, the simulation encourages the participants to implement their newly acquired skills in their private and family practice (Implement).
Languages and experience:
The material is available in various languages and can be translated and produced in any local language. The material is tried and tested in many courses and cultural contexts all around the world.
For more details about the Savings Game, visit our HQ website.
