Personal Management
Merit Badge

After he leaves your troop, a Scout might never cook over a campfire, hike into the wilderness or use CPR to save a life. But he will undoubtedly need to manage his time and money. How effectively he does that could depend on what he learns from the Personal Management merit badge. For tips on teaching this important badge, Scouting talked with Mark Pellegrino of Yardley, Pa., a CPA who’s been counseling the badge for 35 years. Here are his top tips. Budgeting Basics Requirement 2 has the Scout prepare a budget of expected income, expenses and savings, and then track those categories over a 13-week period. Pellegrino says this requirement is essentially meaningless if the Scout doesn’t have a job and if his parents pay his way for everything. In such cases — which seem to be becoming more frequent — Pellegrino encourages the parents to temporarily stop covering certain expenses, like school lunch fees, and instead to pay the Scout for doing his chores. “I want to make sure they have enough expenses and enough leeway and enough decision-making capability that they understand their choices are going to affect what may happen,” he says. Pellegrino also says it’s important for Scouts to turn in their proposed budgets before they start keeping records. Years ago, one Scout didn’t do that because he didn’t understand that a budget is a planning document, not a money diary. “I want to make sure you didn’t do 13 weeks and then backfill the budget,” Pellegrino says. From Theory to Practical The badge’s first requirement has the Scout write a plan for a proposed family expense; the last requirement has the Scout research a career. In both cases, Pellegrino encourages Scouts to keep it real. In the latter case, the Scout will come out with some valuable information he could use as he thinks about life after high school. In the former case, he might just come out with a new flat-screen TV or family computer (items Scouts often research for that requirement). “Don’t just do these requirements as if they’re in a vacuum,” Pellegrino says. Learn by Doing Finally, Pellegrino encourages Scouts to approach the badge as they would approach any time-management challenge. “I usually recommend that they work on one or two of those big requirements first and get that going,” he says. “Since that’s going to take some time, they can do these other five (requirements 4 through 7) where we just sit together.” When a Scout is working on any merit badge, he’s supposed to take the initiative instead of relying on the counselor to tell him what to do next. Pellegrino says that’s especially important with Personal Management. “I want them to figure out how to manage themselves and figure out how to get the merit badge done,” he says. “If they want to ask me questions about specific things, I will definitely give them the information, but I want them to figure out how they’re going to do it, using me as a resource or whatever resources they have.”

The Personal Management Merit Badge is the best lesson in what money can buy. In the decade or so that he’s been teaching Personal Management merit badge, Ted McLaughlin has seen his share of glazed eyes and blank stares as he’s talked about terms such as compound interest, mutual funds, and return on investment. But the Minneapolis Scouter knows just how to get the attention of a group of Scouts: hand them his credit cards. “The moment you hand them a credit card, they come to life,” he says. And as he reels off each card’s credit limit, the Scouts quickly spend that money in their heads—on Xbox 360s, iPods, cars, and other toys. Then McLaughlin asks a simple question: “How many of you thought about how you were going to pay for that?” When he has their attention, McLaughlin helps the Scouts work through some calculations, figuring out what happens, for example, when someone only makes minimum payments or gets hit with a late charge or a higher interest rate—all concepts related to requirement 7. “The best part is when boys realize, ‘We’ll never pay that off,’” McLaughlin says. “That’s the point I try real hard to drive home to them.” Craig Lincoln, a merit badge counselor from Joliet, Ill., takes a similar approach to requirement 6, which covers ways to invest $1,000. Rather than start off with long-term goals like retirement, he focuses on the Scouts’ own lives. “If you had $1,000 and you wanted to save it, what would you be saving for?” he’ll ask. “Would you be saving for college? A car?” Once he and a Scout have discussed ways to save for short-term goals, Lincoln can talk about goals with a longer time horizon. “The thing that makes a CD or savings account the best option for saving for a car two years from now might not be as good an option for something really long term,” he says. It’s also important to tailor examples to each Scout’s family situation, McLaughlin says. He works with two troops—one made up of middle-class suburban boys and the other of second-generation Americans living in cramped inner-city apartments. The former Scouts might plan a trip to Disney World for requirement 1 (develop a plan for a major family purchase), while the latter Scouts might talk about buying a new refrigerator. “The kids from the immigrant families aren’t going to Disney World,” he says. “That’s so pie-in-the-sky that they can’t even relate to it.” Both McLaughlin and Lincoln often teach Personal Management at merit badge clinics. Although settings like that can make it hard to tailor the material to individual Scouts, they offer other benefits, Lincoln says. “It’s really fun to share ideas and talk things out. A group setting allows Scouts to learn not just from a counselor but from one another.” Lincoln is also a strong proponent of using the buddy system for this badge. “Part of what makes Personal Management hard is that you feel so isolated,” he says. “It’s 90 days of you doing something on your own, and that’s hard.” When Scouts buddy up, however, they can hold each other accountable as they track their income, expenses, and savings over 13 consecutive weeks (requirement 2). Each Scout must be reviewed individually on all of his progress, of course, but he’s more likely to finish all of the merit badge requirements when he works with a buddy. “Life’s better when you do it with a friend,” Lincoln says. And so is Personal Management merit badge.