Stronger Families: Managing finances is one of the life-changing skills needed so families can be strong and thrive

Stronger Families is focused on supporting healthy marriages and stronger families for military, first responders and veterans. Their program, Oxygen for your Relationship, is also a hallmark for the military and working with marriage mentors in churches. Noel Meador, Executive Director, was looking for a tool that would help people address their finances by engaging participants, getting them to open up and making it an enjoyable process instead of the more traditional dry budgeting workshop. Money Habitudes was exactly what he was looking for.

Outcomes

• Give people a way to understand their relationship with money in a more holistic light.
• Provide insights on their own and their spouses’ spending and saving habits that lead to breakthroughs allowing for more productive subsequent discussions about budgets.
• Offer an easy way for marriage mentors to share their experience and outcomes using Money Habitudes with other couples.
• Provide insights into how finances for military members can affect how they’re treating their spouse, why they’re not communicating well or why there’s conflict.
• The discussions opened up by cards when working with military members help them see how their finances are affecting how they’re treating their spouse, or maybe why they are not communicating well or why there’s conflict.
• It establishes a pattern of respectful dialogue where partners come to appreciate each other’s motivations and attitudes and makes other difficult conversations easier to have

How They Use Money Habitudes

• Stronger Families uses the Money Habitudes program as part of their 4-hour Oxygen for your Relationship Seminar.
• Marriage mentors from area churches are trained in the half-day so they can teach and instruct other couples who want to improve or save their marriage. After doing Money Habitudes themselves, they are eager to share it with others couples and find it leads people to more easily begin to talk and bring up both financial and marital issues
• With the military, they work directly with groups of soldiers who play Money Habitudes as a lead into lessons using Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace on managing their budget and being good stewards of their money.