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Families in Tough Times |
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Avoiding Tough Times
Are you and your family actively trying to avoid tough times? If you have had a recent job change or expense increase you most likely will need to make some difficult decisions related to your family’s finances. Even if you and your family are currently “fine”, the current crisis presents great motivation for all of us to better manage finances and build emergency funds should we need it in the future.
Publications | Trainings | News Releases | For Professionals
Publications
- The Cost of Raising Children — This easy-to-use tool helps you estimate the cost of raising one or more children in a one or two parent family.
- Eat Healthy for Less — Tips, worksheets, videos, and more will help your family stay healthy during challenging economic times by spending less.
- How Resilient are You? — An interactive assessment that helps you assess your resilience in times of change. It also assesses how positive, flexible, proactive, focused and organized you are in times of change.
- Personal Finance — Easy-to-use resources (like "Financial Security: Managing Money in Tough Times") brought to you by educators from the Cooperative Extension System.
- Ways to Save: Ideas from the Others Like You (41 K PDF) — Ideas to reduce expenses in six areas: clothing, food, house, children, personal, and energy.
- Economic Adjustment Strategies Assessments:
Take each assessment to see how you are doing and to get ideas from others like you.
- Energy Actions to Save $ and Increase Comfort for Renters (PDF) — By conserving energy you can lower your utility bills and increase your comfort in your own home.
- Financing Long Term Care — A resource center for families that aims to improve what people know about long term care and help families take action before crisis.
- Parents Forever: Money Issues in Divorce Parent Handbook — Most parents experience financial upheaval when they get divorced. This booklet discusses how to adjust to suddenly reduced income and how to figure out the cost of raising your children so that you can better plan for their future and your own.
- Padres para siempre: Divorcio y dinero — An adapted Spanish version of the parent handbook that discusses money issues and divorce.
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Trainings
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News Releases
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For Professionals
- Families Navigating Economic Crises — An online community of practice for the CYFERNet community that looks at the current economic crises and the resources Extension can bring to the table. This is facilitiated by staff from the University of Minnesota Extension Center for Family Development.
- Take and Teach Lessons Series for Times in Economic Crisis — These short, easy-to use lessons are designed for professionals who teach families either in large group sessions or one-on-one. They help families work on strategies that will make a difference in these tough economic times.
- The Minnesota Food and Nutrition Network — This member-based organization fosters coalitions to build and strengthen alliances focused on nutrition and physical activity for low-income persons.
- Simply Good Eating Curriculum — A comprehensive curriculum to teach participants basic nutrition principles on food choices, planning healthy meals on a limited budget, stretching their food dollar, and cooking with an emphasis on safe food practices.
- Dollar Works 2: A Personal Financial Education Program — This comprehensive publication teaches basic economic concepts to strengthen people’s skills in managing their personal finances and making sound decisions with money.
- Dollar Works 2: Train-the-Trainer Workshops — Customizable trainings for vice providers, volunteers, and other professionals on how to use Dollar Works 2 in their programs, classes, and one-on-one settings.
- Allowances and Alternatives — This publication provides an overview for the four main ways children receive money (cash gifts, earned money, dole, and allowances) and the advantages/disadvantages of each system.
- Teaching Children Money Habits for Life — This publication provides an overview of the topic as well as teaching suggestions for addressing earning, spending, borrowing, sharing, and saving.
- Teen Talk Fact Sheet: I Need to Get a Job — This fact sheet helps parents talk to their teen before he/she gets a job.
- Youth Issues: Affluenza — Teach a lesson on affluenza, the epidemic related to the dogged pursuit of the American dream, to youth.
- Youth & Money Programs:
Contact a Youth and Money Educator in your area for more information.
- Financial Fitness for Life — A curriculum, developed by the National Council on Economic Education (NCEE), helps students apply economic concepts and decision-making skills to the real world of earning, spending, saving, credit, and managing money.
- High School Financial Planning Program — A six unit program, developed by the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE)®, teaches teens personal management goals, budgeting, tracking income and spending, credit, insurance, and the time value of money.
Contact a Youth and Money Educator in your area for more information.
- Learning, Earning & Investing — A curriculum also by NCEE, is a comprehensive investment education which introduces students to the ins-and-outs of long-term investing, including a critical look at investment opportunities - mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and more - and uncovers strategies for building lasting wealth.
- Managing College Life: Your Money, Your Housing, Your Future — Four educational workshops for college students address issues of credit and debt, identity theft, financial literacy and tenant education. Each topic can be taught in a 1-hour workshop or combined with others to customize workshops for college students.
- Parents Forever: Money Issues in Divorce Educator Guide — The unit of the Parents Forever curriculum helps professionals work with divorcing parents to adjust to grief and loss in child-supportive ways, reassess how money will be used, identify present and future goals for their children, talk with their children about money changes, and manage conflict in a way that respects their children.
- Together We Can: Creating a Healthy Future for our Family — A free online curriculum that improves co-parenting relationships of single parents. It includes one module relating to managing resources.
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Tough Times Resources
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