If you missed the original teleseminar we did on The Money Game but don’t want to listen to, you can read what we talked about here. My suggestion is to print it out, find yourself a little tea and enjoy…

Here we go…

“Hi and Welcome to The Money Game Teleseminar

My name is Elisabeth Donati.

Are you concerned/does it bother you that our children aren’t learning about money at school or at home? You’re not alone.

Are you looking for a fun, effective way to teach a small to large group of kids the basic money management skills and information they need to thrive in life? Great. Let me tell you about The Money Game.

In order to really tell you what The Money Game is, I wanted to give you a little history.

HISTORY:

In the beginning, when I first started doing Money Camps, they were pretty boring. The parents said the kids learned a lot, but I wasn’t convinced they would remember what we thought we were teaching them.

A lot has happened between then and now!

Our programs are so much fun now and kids remember so much because they learn about money in their cells… but it wasn’t always this way. In the beginning, oh… in the beginning… do I remember that first camp with 39 kids in a crowded room at a local Boys & Girls Club during a hot, sticky over in August of ’02.

We talked, they listened, we felt like school teachers and they felt like students… but we all wanted to be at CAMP.

What I know now is what we were doing wrong because they’re… major mistakes most people make when teaching the topic of money to people… and it doesn’t matter if it’s kids or adults… we’ll get to those mistakes in a bit, but I want to finish telling you how The Money Game came to be. It’ll help you understand it better.

The 2nd and 3rd year we did camp – we did four this year – they were better, starting to be more fun, more role-playing, acting, playful, but still not what I knew it could be. I loved what we were teaching… just not how we were teaching it!

So I started asking out loud, “What am I missing? How can we turn this into the most profoundly effective financial education program available?”

It wasn’t too long after that that a ticket found its way into my hand… and not just any ticket. This ticket was for a program called The Millionaire Mind Intensive. I’m still not really sure where the ticket came from but I owe The Money Game to that person.

You see, that 3-hour evening event led to my taking over $30,000 worth of educational and personal growth seminars for  me. One of the most valuable things I learned through those programs was this amazing teaching technique called Accelerated Learning. It was profound and it shifted the way I taught forever.

I started using those techniques before I knew what they were called, how they worked, and why they turned common boring lectures into deeply sticky and profoundly effective educational experiences.

I saw it done… I did it… it worked. I had to know more.

Over the past 5 years, I have taken close to 20 seminars ranging from Train the Trainer workshops to real estate courses to warrior camps and the World’s Greatest Marketing Seminars.

I learned quickly and easily, retaining more information from a five day seminar than I learned in any high school or college classes.

I started applying what I was learning to the camps, both the kids and adults, and saw an immediate shift… we were having fun teaching, they were having a blast learning… even if they hadn’t wanted to come in the first place.

I knew one thing: I had found the key to creating not just a great financial literacy program but what I knew would be the best program anyone had ever seen or experienced.

The Money Game evolved out of my desire to make what we were teaching visceral and by that I mean create an experience where the participants took what they learned home in their cells so they’d never forget it.

The game literally gave birth to itself… we didn’t really set out to create what we got. We just kept asking this question over and over again… “How can we teach blah-blah-blah in a way that will fun, engaging, and sticky?”

And every time we asked, we got a new piece of the game delivered to us on a silver platter.

My instructor, Pamela, added her parts, the creative people who came to my TTT added delightful nuances and slowly it just manifested into what it is today.

The name was just an offshoot of what we were teaching and I took it as no coincidence that we were able to get the registered trademark. It’s as though it was pre-ordained to be born in order to change lives all over the globe… and change them we are doing.

And that’s where you come in…

Change happens when ordinary people choose to challenge the status quo by doing extraordinary things.

Change happens when you make out-of-the-box tools to craft an excitedly different and grander impact on society.

Change happens when you ask people to think differently about a subject that most people don’t understand.

Change happens when we actually make the decision to step up and do whatever we can to make the difference we know we’re supposed to make.

And because you’re on this call, I know you are one of the ones who are going to make a difference.

So, if you’re still with me, let me tell you about these mistakes…

Mistakes… Why Financial Education usually doesn’t work

Preaching – mostly auditory! VAK

Not fun!

Not checking in first to make sure it’s relevant, i.e. giving people a big enough “hwy” to want to learn it

Teach information that’s too advanced or complicated. Only need basics at first

Use Power Point

Don’t ask enough questions to find out what they want to know first

Don’t use music – helps us remember

Don’t use movement – physical is memorable

Don’t practice skills – repetition is the mother of skill

Now that you know the most common mistakes, you probably can imagine the secrets to a program that is successful, that engages your students… one that they can remember long after they learn it in your classroom or in a weekend event.

I wrote a blog a few weeks ago and listed the six requirements of a spectacular financial literacy program. In a nutshell, these were the requirements:

1) The CONTEXT must be fun; in other words, it must be playful, full of stories, entertainment (even if the kids are doing the entertaining), colorful, debates, contests, joking around, celebration,

2) Must teach about investing in assets and passive income

3) Must not focus on ‘getting a job’ but creating a job/business. Being the CEO of your own life

4) Full of movement and emotion

5) Content needs to be a lot more than budgeting (which rarely works) but money management and more than writing a check or balancing a budget: debt, how to save, money jars, and a lot more

6) BONUS: It has to use accelerated/active learning techniques: call backs, ask don’t tell, experience before content

The Money Game doesn’t just meet these requirements, it exceeds them by a long shot. It’s everything most financial education programs aren’t.

It works because the kids learn money by doing money, by practicing over and over again what to do with it. They experience getting passive income after investing in assets and love it. They eventually realize that when they have more passive income coming in than they have expenses, they don’t need the paycheck!

We like to say that the kids are the pieces and the lessons last a lifetime.

Here’s just some of what players learn by playing The Money GAme:

• Basic financial principles most financially free people learn and use regularly…like Pay Yourself First, Put Money to Work For You and 24 more!

• Not making money mean more than it is…a tool to reach our dreams, and help other people reach theirs.

• How to shake hands properly and why doing it correctly is important in life.

• Why keeping agreements is critical in both our business and personal lives.

• How to create, and reach, both short-term and long-term goals. After all, what good is it to teach kids how to SET goals if you don’t show them the secrets to reaching them?

• How to THINK about money, abundance and wealth in ways that support your goals (this was a biggy for me).

• Why and how we waste much of our financial resources on something I dubbed Piddlyjunk.

• Why and how to create passive income streams so you can eventually become financially free and only work because you want to (and it doesn’t involve getting a J.O.B.).

• And one of my favorites…why giving back and doing good with your extra money is so vitally important to having enough of it in the first place. (It has to do with an abundance mentality.)

What is comes with:

The Money Game is available as a complete downloadable kit where you print and assemble the pieces yourself OR a ready-to-play package…whichever is more convenient for you. Both kits include…

• A simple, straight-forward, step-by-step Instructional Manual. We’ve included every step you need in this easy-to-read manual…including the actual dialogue you use to teach the game.

• Immediate access to our simple online Instruction Videos. Follow along with your manual and you’ll be teaching The Money Game™ in no time.

• All of the pieces and parts to the game to print and create at home, school or the office or ready to use right from the box. Materials include: the expense and asset game bags, paycheck money, game registers, passive income and event cards.

Features and Benefits of The Money Game

• It’s experiential…even kids ‘labeled’ with learning disabilities learn from this highly active financial game.

• It has been used to successfully educate youth and adults for since 2005.

• For people who learn from the program or learn how to teach it, it changes the face of financial literacy education forever.

• It includes 5 simple accelerated teaching secrets that guarantee to improve the way your students learn…over night…no matter how young or old they are (or what you’re teaching)!

• It teaches the secret to creating financially free adults who will never use the word RETIRE!

• It shows you how to simply and easily make sure your students eventually move out and stay out after they leave home.

• It teaches the same secrets that wealthy families teach their children when they want to make sure they know how to be good stewards of their inheritances.

• It explains how to quickly and effectually teach a room of students (young and old) basic money principles they must know to be financially successful.

• People call this ‘the best’ financial literacy program because our participants don’t take notes, learn with their whole bodies and the lessons they learn about money and investing last forever.

• The only financial literacy game program that can be modified easily…

• …to fit age groups from 8 years old to 108. Really! Think about it…if you didn’t learn about money when you were young, you still need to learn the same basic financial foundation before learning anything else.

• …and taught in any length program…from 3 hours to 5 days or longer.

• …can be presented in numerous formats (1 hour a day for many weeks, once a week for any number of weeks, every day for an hour for a week, etc.

• …as a stand-alone program or under an existing education umbrella.

• …for use as traditional school programs, home school curriculum, day camps, after school programs, church youth groups events, youth leadership events, nonprofit youth organizations, homeless shelters with families, foster care youth.

• …for use in an employer sponsored financial education program for employees (Note: Don’t want to teach it yourself? Hire one of our Creative Wealth Coaches to come in and do it for you.)

• Easy to alter for any culture or age group.

Very easy to expand by adding additional activities to add more value to the participants and get more important financial lessons under their belts.

That’s it for now…