Good $ense Budget Course

The Good $ense Budget Course aims at helping people experience the joy of financial freedom.

• About 43% of American families spend more than they earn each year.
  
• Average households carry some $8,000 in credit card debt.
  
• Personal bankruptcies have doubled in the past decade.

This course helps participants discover tools & develop skills that enable them to control their finances, rather than allowing their finances to control them.
That may be good & all, but shouldn't people go see a financial planner for this? Why should the church be involved?
"We come to the Bible for comfort, not financial instruction. If we want to know about money, we're more apt to pick up the Wall Street Journal...Scripture should concern itself with what's spiritual and heavenly. Money is physical and earthly." But Scripture devotes twice as many verses to money (about 2,350 of them) than to faith and prayer combined. Jesus said more about money than both heaven and hell. (from Randy Alcorn's excellent book, Money, Possessions and Eternity).

The Good $ense Budget Course will lead your church, workshop, Sunday school class or small group through the importance of seeing ourselves as "trustees" instead of "owners" with our money and finances, and how to prioritize their goals and develop a spending plan.
The format for this course can be done in a multitude of ways. It can be given as a one-day workshop (around five hours total), in six sessions (good for small groups, Sunday school classes and ABF's), or in a retreat format from one to three days long.
There is a good deal of preparation that needs to go into putting on a course. There is pre-work which each participant must do (around six pages & in depth) and the leader of the course must have a good handle on the material. There is a CD-Rom which has a Power-Point presentation on it as well as a DVD which has short video vignettes, but the leader needs a good amount of prep time before coming to a session.
The material itself is well worth the work which must be done. It is important to have a good financial picture and stick to a budget (this comes from one who has a very hard time doing what I just said!). But I believe the overall idea of the course that we are entrusted with what we are given and that we need to be able to give an account of what we have done with it.