Soon after walking into a new finance course at Jefferson County Fairgrounds last Thursday, I learned I was 35 years old, single with two children, working as an accountant and renting a studio apartment without a car. (I’m 22, with no children, and this is my job).
By the end of the hour, I had survived an emergency room visit, thanks to the health insurance I had chosen, and finished the month with $845 to spare.
It was all part of a dice-driven exercise called the “Budgeting of Life Game,” the opening activity of the Boulder edition of Financial Fitness, a free public course developed by Valley Bank and Jefferson Local Development Corporation.
Holly Mullaney, assistant branch manager and consumer lender at Valley Bank’s Butte branch, led the March 26 session alongside four other bank representatives. Among the four finance students were Leah Lewis, a JLDC project officer and Boulder rancher, Mandy Haller, who works at Yellowstone Boys and Girls Ranch, and Samantha Yearry, JLDC executive director.
Participants rolled dice to determine a fictional life scenario: their family status dictated whether they received child support or a spouse’s income, their career set their monthly wages, their housing determined a rent or mortgage payment, and their vehicle, if they had one, added a car payment and insurance.
From there, they built out a monthly budget, allocating what remained toward wants like dining out or a gym membership, and savings, before a final roll dealt an unexpected expense.
Lewis landed as a 59-year-old dental hygienist with nine cats, a huge house and a car who needed $500 when her alternator gave out. “I have a huge house I don’t need, but that’s a lot of cats,” Lewis said, before joking that “they might need their own rooms and cat trees and stuff.”
Haller was a married 62-year-old lawyer with six kids, no car and a three-bedroom house with a $1,600 mortgage, and had enough to spare at the end of the month after expenses, savings and fixing her TV. “I’m apparently married at 62 with six kids, which sounds terrible,” Haller said. “Luckily, I’m a lawyer, to be able to afford all of these kids.”
Everyone finished the month with money left over, but Mullaney said that in her experience as a lender, that is not always the case. She regularly encounters high earners who struggle and modest earners who do not.
“Usually, if you don’t have a budget, things can go awry,” Mullaney said. “You have that emergency, you don’t have any savings, and you’re scrambling to figure out what to do.”
Mullaney said the difference often comes down to discipline.
“I often see people that make great amounts of money and they really struggle,” she said. “I do see people that are very low income and they do just fine, because you really just need to live within your means.”
After the game, Mullaney walked the room through a list of strategies designed to make saving up feel achievable. One challenge asked participants to save $1 in the first week, $2 in the second and so on, up to $52 in the year’s last week – resulting in $1,378 saved by year’s end. Mullaney suggested starting in reverse, beginning at $52 when motivation is fresh and letting the weekly contribution shrink from there.
Other methods included a temperature challenge in which participants save an amount each day equal to the forecasted high, and a subscription pause challenge in which streaming service fees are redirected to savings for a set period.
The class also touched on banking for young people. When Yearry asked whether having a checking account would help a teenager qualify for a loan, Mullaney said it would not, because checking accounts do not report to credit bureaus.
She pointed instead to Valley Bank’s credit builder loan, a program for people looking to establish or repair their credit history. The bank issues a $500 loan and deposits it directly into a locked savings account, which the borrower cannot access until the loan is repaid at about $23 a month over two years. Throughout that period, the loan reports to all three major credit bureaus.
It typically takes about seven months for someone with no credit history to develop a score, Mullaney said. A mid-600s score is roughly average, says the bank, while 750 and above is excellent.
Valley Bank also runs a good grades program for students aged 14 to 26, paying account-holders $3 for each A on a report card (up to $20 max), and $5 for a 4.0 or above grade point average. Students can earn an additional $10 for completing a financial literacy course on the bank’s website and are entered into a $500 scholarship drawing each time they bring in a report card. A checking account with the bank is required to participate.
One question from the room opened the conversation further and covered FDIC insurance, with one attendee asking how the standard $250,000 per-person coverage limit can be extended.
Another, about mortgage rates, prompted Ryan Cobb, a real estate lender at Valley Bank’s Helena branch, to explain that 30-year loans currently sit in the mid-6% range, having edged back up amid the ongoing conflict with Iran. Cobb noted that buyers can negotiate to buy their rate down, an option he said most people are unaware of.
Yearry said JLDC officials raised the idea of a finance course at a meeting with Valley Bank last year, and the two began working together, drawing on the expertise of their members, on a course meant to provide residents with practical financial guidance.
Seeking to attract broader participation, JLDC plans to announce new finance topics for upcoming classes, shaped by what residents have expressed interest in learning. This could include fraud, commercial lending for startups, online banking basics for older residents, estate planning around bank accounts, first-time homebuying, rebuilding credit and more.
“Having a better handle on your finances helps you invest into the community,” Yearry said.
“I’m looking forward to the next session and the chance to dig deeper into interest rates and strategic ways to pay off mortgage loans faster,” Lewis said.
The classes run monthly through October, alternating between Boulder and Whitehall. Boulder sessions are held at the fairgrounds, at 21 Whitetail Road, with remaining dates on May 28, July 30 and Sept. 24. Whitehall classes are at 5 Whitetail Road on April 30, June 25, Aug. 27 and Oct. 29. All sessions run noon to 1 p.m. and are free and open to the public.
