Canadian immigrant pioneers financial education for Israeli youth.

IS POVERTY in Israel partly a result of personal money mismanagement in our ‘culture of consumer temptation’? According to Mindy Ajzner, director of non-profit Chaim BePlus organization, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Her goal is to reduce poverty with education in proper money management and financial responsibility.

This is not merely an idealistic mission statement about the plight of the poor in Israel. Rather, Mindy has developed a successful six-session, skill oriented course to instruct young adults and their parents and teachers how to manage their money carefully and avoid personal debt. Chaim BePlus is a registered nonprofit organization that provides the Financial Independence Training course to young people at a critical financial junction of their lives when they go into the army, begin to drive, open bank accounts and live more independently.

Simply put, Chaim BePlus courses recognize that most Israelis are not equipped to make budgets and live within their means because no one has ever taught them to! The name Chaim BePlus is a play on the expression chaim b’minus, a Hebrew expression for living with a bank overdraft. Israeli salaries are low compared to the U.S. and other affluent countries, yet daily Israelis are bombarded via foreign television and the internet with appeals to spend and consume. Unless the younger generation learn the difference between what one ‘must have’ and what is optional, they will enter into a spiraling downfall into debt.

The big question is: does this type of training work and who is it working for? To date, over 400 young adults from all walks of Israeli society have participated in the workshops. Young couples, National Service women, Nefesh b’Nefesh immigrants and teenagers in sheltered dormitory schools have all given similar feedback about what they learned from Chaim BePlus. “I now feel that I have options I never thought of previously. The course has made me think of my current and future spending habits. It is very significant and impacts on everyone’s life”, wrote a Grade 12 student in a Kfar Saba high school. A married student reported: “At the end of the course my feeling was that we were absolutely saved from serious economic downfall, by learning how to make an exact accounting of income and expenses.”

Modeled on a financial education course taught to millions of American children, the Chaim BePlus training has been adapted to Israeli conditions and is taught in Hebrew. Topics covered include supervising a bank account, monitoring cellular phones, saving for future goals, creating a budget, managing credit cards, and financial decision-making in the family. The hands-on courses are taught using actual financial transactions and paperwork as well as role play and socio-drama to enact real life scenarios.

In addition, career planning forms a vital part of the instruction. Students are presented with an array of over sixty lucrative career choices to analyze. Director Mindy Ajzner, a long-time resident of Raanana who made aliyah from Toronto, Canada, firmly believes that individual personal choices influence the course of one’s life more than outside influences. To that end, she has started the “Working Women Project” which brings professional women from all walks of Israeli society to speak to high school students. These visiting professionals describe their jobs, the job market in their field, salaries, satisfaction, and how family and career can be combined successfully.

Chaim BePlus would like to expand to all the country’s schools, and is hoping to do that with the help of corporate, community and private sponsors from Israel and abroad. For example, Ajzner is planning a savings and investment club for graduates in partnership with a bank or other financial institution which will motivate them to sustain lifelong good habits in spending and saving. This is truly an investment in Israel’s future economic stability.

For more information about Chaim BePlus-Financial Independence Training, call 054 445 1961, email, mindy@chaimbeplus.com or visit www.chaimbeplus.com