Personal Management Merit Badge

The one thing to get right

Write the budget before the thirteen weeks start.

Requirement 2(a) asks for a budget covering thirteen consecutive weeks. Requirement 2(c) asks you to track your actual income, expenses and savings for the same thirteen-week period. Requirement 2(d) then asks you to compare the two and work out where the budget held and where it did not.

So the order is fixed by the requirements themselves: budget, then the weeks, then the comparison. A Scout who keeps three months of careful records and writes the budget at the end has nothing to compare them against, and has to start the three months again.

This is the requirement that decides how long the badge takes. Everything else on this page can be done in a few evenings.

What this page is

The Personal Management merit badge, laid out so its long chain and its flat parts are told apart. It is not a copy of the requirements: each step is a short label with a link to the official requirements, which are what actually governs and which change from year to year.

How a merit badge is earned at all is a separate page, How to Earn a Merit Badge.

The other chains

Requirement 1. Pick the major purchase first (1a). The savings plan (1b) and the shopping strategy (1c) are both for that item, so choosing it is not a warm-up, it is the thing everything else in requirement 1 refers to.

Requirement 8. A to-do list in order of importance, a seven-day calendar built around your fixed commitments, the week actually lived with a daily journal, then a review with your counselor. It is requirement 2 in miniature, and it runs for a week.

The flat part, and there is a lot of it

Requirements 4, 5, 6 and 7 are twenty-three explanations: saving against investing, risk and return, simple and compound interest, diversification, retirement; stocks, funds, life insurance, CDs, savings accounts and savings bonds; car, health, home and life insurance; loans, APR, borrowing, cards, credit reports and getting out of debt.

None of them depends on any other and this page does not pretend otherwise. They are grouped so you can see that they are one long session with your counselor rather than twenty-three separate errands.

Where you choose

Requirement 3 asks you to discuss five of eight concepts about money and how you behave around it. Answer the question above the plan and the three you are not doing come off your list.