We’re all familiar with the traditional piggy bank. The cute curly tail, smiling piggy face, and slot on its back for depositing cash. It teaches kids to save their money at an early age, produces a hearty jingle from the coins when shaken, and offers a certain satisfaction when the time comes to break it open with a hammer. But imagine a piggy bank with four slots, four chambers with specific purposes. This invention is not your traditional bank. It is the brain child of Susan Beacham, a financially-savvy mother who realized that young kids need more than just the normal ceramic pig to learn about their managing money.
Beacham’s four-chambered bank, lovingly called the Money Saving Pig, is not one designed to be cracked into impulsively. Its separate compartments are meant to teach children to hold onto their money. ‘Save’, ‘Spend’, ‘Invest’ and ‘Donate’ label each chamber, and along with Beacham’s teaching curriculum this ingenious pig teaches kids as young as six how to divide their finances.
The idea for Beacham’s educational plan came about five years ago. At the time, she was a financial service advisor, teaching recently divorced and widowed women how to budget their money. She realized that focusing on money at time of crisis is the worst time for a person, but found that she had a hard time getting people to focus on it before then was sometimes nearly impossible. Then one day, as she was helping her first-grade daughter with her Latin homework (yes, Latin in elementary school!), she had a revelation.
“If she’s learning something as complicated as Latin in first grade, then why can’t we get [kids] to learn something about finances as well?” Beacham asked herself. She realized that financial education needs to start much sooner in life, when behavior and thinking could be easily molded.
“I’ve always had a burning desire to work with and help kids,” she said. “I originally wanted to go into social work, to save the world.” So when going to law school and later into financial services didn’t seem fulfilling to her, she decided to quit teaching adults how to budget, save and invest their money and focused on reaching out to the kids instead. To her, it seemed as though she had finally found a way to follow her calling in life.
However, Beacham reached a snag in her plan when she realized teaching kids requires much different tactics than teaching adults.
“I walked into a first grade classroom and found I was incapable of talking to kids. I was presenting these ideas as though to adults,” she said. “Kids don’t deal very well with abstract concepts; their brains aren’t developed enough.”
She figured out that she needed to use concrete teaching techniques with the kids, and soon devised a method of four cups attached with twist ties. Her pupils loved the idea, and Beacham’s education made a good impression on them. The children would take the cup idea home to their parents and show them how they learned to save their money. But here lay another problem: the flimsy plastic cups, though great in theory, rarely made the rough trip from school to home. They would break on the bus, tear in backpacks, were in general not sturdy enough to be a permanent learning tool.
One night, Beacham said, she dreamed up her solution. Her dream was of a piggy bank. At first glance it was just a normal bank, but looking closer she saw it had four slots and compartments labeled like her cup creation. Right away, she decided to invest in this idea. Pretty soon the Money Saving Pig was in the works, a sturdy plastic bank that made a more permanent solution to her inventive cup idea.
Beacham’s next task was to figure out how to sell her bank. While sitting in her booth at a gift show in Chicago, she listened to a constant stream of orders launched at the nearby Beanie Baby booth and wondered how she could get that kind of business.
“It was humbling to hear people screaming out orders of beanie babies, with no one at my booth,” she said. Eventually, a woman approached Beacham’s booth and asked “Are these yours?” Exasperated, Beacham replied shortly that she was selling them. “No,” the woman replied, “I mean, did you invent them?” Taking Beacham’s hand, the women went on to explain that her pastor was on a mission to cure the world of “social ills”, and that she believed this financial education tool could be a great attribution to the world.
It wasn’t long before Beacham was receiving phone calls from women’s and children’s shelters, advocacy groups, even Oprah, asking her to spread the word about her mission. She appeared on Dr. Phil twice, which launched her plan farther than she could have imagined. Soon countries such as Australia, Mexico and Switzerland were using her teaching methods and Money Saving Pig.
Eleven years later, the company has sold over two million piggy banks and teaches its finance curriculum in 32 states and several countries worldwide. Her program is taught in classrooms, homes, after-school programs, financial programs, summer camps and Sunday schools. Despite her business’s global popularity, however, Beacham says her focus is not on expanding the company so much as making a difference in the world. During our interview, she admitted that she was less worried about the Washington Post’s upcoming article about her product, and more nervous about having to teach in front of 89 elementary students.
Through the years, Beacham has viewed her success as a gift from God.
“I believe that so much of the work we are doing is grace in our life,” she said. “I know that what we’ve done takes a certain amount of ambition, and stone-cold belief that this is the right thing to do.”
And you can take that to the bank.