Troop 89 logo
Troop 89
Great Bend, PA

Personal Management Merit Badge

Categories: Merit Badges
Wishlist Share

About Course

Personal Management is one of the Eagle-required merit badges, and it is built around two things you cannot rush: thirteen weeks of budgeting and tracking your own money, and one full week of living a schedule you planned yourself.

Everything else in the badge — saving and investing, insurance, credit and debt, project planning, and careers — is knowledge you can study while those thirteen weeks are running. That is exactly how this course is ordered. You set up your budget in the first topic and start the clock, then learn the rest while you track.

This course covers all ten requirements. The knowledge topics end with a quiz, including open-ended questions that make you rehearse the explanations you will give your counselor out loud. The work topics end with something you submit, through a private upload page that sends it straight to your counselor.

You will also find a printable 13-week budget and tracking sheet, and a spreadsheet version if you would rather let a computer do the arithmetic.

This course is general financial education to help you meet the requirements. It is not financial advice.

Show More

What Will You Learn?

  • Prepare a 13-week budget and track your actual income, expenses, and savings against it
  • Write a savings plan and a shopping strategy for a major family purchase
  • Explain saving versus investing, risk and return, simple and compound interest, and diversification
  • Describe how common stocks, mutual funds, life insurance, CDs, savings accounts, and US savings bonds work
  • Explain why people buy automobile, health, homeowner's/renter's, and life insurance
  • Explain what a loan costs, what APR measures, and how charge, debit, and credit cards differ
  • Plan and live a seven-day schedule, then review honestly what worked and what did not
  • Write a complete project plan with a goal, timeline, resources, and budget
  • Research a career and work out what it will cost you to get there

Course Content

Topic 1: Start Here
This badge contains a 13-week clock and a family conversation, and both should start in your first week. Read this topic before anything else: it tells you what to begin now, what can wait, and why the order matters more here than in almost any other merit badge.

  • Start Here: How This Badge Works
  • Thrifty Is a Point of the Scout Law
  • Quiz: Getting Oriented

Topic 2: Start the Clock — Your 13-Week Budget
Requirements 2(a) and 2(b). You plan your income, expenses, and savings for 13 consecutive weeks, then compare the two sides and decide what to do about the gap. Finish this topic in your first week: the tracking in Topic 11 has to cover the same 13 weeks you budget here.

Topic 3: The Family Purchase
Requirement 1. You pick something your family might want that counts as a major expense, write a plan for saving up for it, and work out how to buy it well. Start this early: two parts of it are conversations with other people.

Topic 4: How You Think About Money
Requirement 3. Eight concepts, of which you discuss FIVE with your counselor. These are the only requirements in the badge with no right answer - they are about your own habits and reactions. Your 13 weeks of tracking are running right now, which makes this the best possible time to notice them.

Topic 5: Saving and Investing
Requirements 4 and 5. The difference between saving and investing, how risk and return are tied together, what compound interest does over time, why diversification works, why retirement matters at your age - and then the six specific investments you must be able to explain.

Topic 6: Insurance
Requirement 6. Why people buy automobile, health, homeowner's or renter's, and life insurance, and how each one actually works. Insurance is the one financial product almost everyone owns and almost nobody can explain, so this topic starts with the mechanism underneath all of them.

Topic 7: Borrowing, Credit, and Debt
Requirement 7. What a loan really costs, the different ways to borrow, how charge, debit and credit cards differ, what a credit report says about you, and how people get out of debt. This is the requirement most likely to save you serious money in your twenties.

Topic 8: Time Management — Your Seven Days
Requirement 8. A to-do list in order of importance, a seven-day schedule, a journal kept every day for a week, and then an honest review of where the plan held and where it did not. It is requirement 2 again, with hours instead of dollars.

Topic 9: A Project Plan on Paper
Requirement 9. A complete written project plan with a goal, a description, a timeline, a resource list, and a budget. This is a project on paper - you do not carry it out - and it is the best practice you will get for an Eagle project workbook before you have to write one.

Topic 10: Careers and What They Cost
Requirement 10. Choose a career you might want after high school or college, find out what it actually takes to get there, and work out what it costs - including how you would cover a shortfall. This is the requirement where everything else in the badge points at your own future.

Topic 11: Close the 13 Weeks
Requirements 2(c) and 2(d). Your tracking period is over. Now you total it up, put it beside the budget you wrote back in Topic 2, and work out honestly where your plan held and where it did not. This is the requirement the whole badge has been waiting on.

Topic 12: Meet Your Counselor
Everything in one place: what you must SHOW, what you must DISCUSS, what to bring, and how to talk through three months of work without forgetting half of it. Read this before you contact your counselor to arrange the final meeting.

Student Ratings & Reviews

No Review Yet
No Review Yet