EL PASO, Texas -
What if someone told you that you could win $10,000 just by being on a reality show about budgeting and paying down debt? That’s just what happened to two fiscally disciplined families who won Greater El Paso Credit Union’s Savings Challenge ’07 recently.
The winning families were judged by a panel of three accountants from a local firm as the best among six families who met their savings goals throughout the year. Camera crews documented their progress on a monthly basis and then aired the footage locally in a reality television format.
The Mares and Aguilar families, both of the El Paso area, each walked away with $10,000. Four other families won $2,500 each.
Early in 2007, GECU put out a casting call of sorts to member families that were interested in taking the savings challenge. Members had to be in good standing with the credit union for at least 90 days and had to demonstrate a desire to significantly improve their financial situation.
GECU’s CEO ended up sifting through at least 70 applications.
“It was more like an extreme financial makeover. We advertised for families that would be interested in learning to save and borrow wisely, to do this publicly on the news media and have the opportunity to win a prize,” said Harriet May, president of the $1.2-billion credit union.
A total of six families were chosen as finalists after a lengthy screening process.
“We worked through ‘em, whittled, and screened ‘em down,” May said. “We got to a second phase and then actually used a videographer to see how they looked on film. Then we had a psychologist sit in to get a feel if the family was stable or not and from those 12 [families] we whittled down to six.”
The six finalists weren’t completely on their own coming up with a yearlong belt-tightening budget. GECU managers helped each family develop and adhere to certain guidelines that encouraged savings and discouraged the use of high-interest-rate credit cards and loans.
“We assigned them to different branch managers,” May said. “Each branch manager sat down with the families, went through their expenditures, set goals and then they balanced the goals family to family–It wasn’t that family one had a lower goal threshold to meet than family two.”
Although each family had a different set of circumstances guiding GECU managers in formulating that particular family’s unique set of financial goals, unexpected circumstances occasionally factored into the contestants financial goals.
“One family turned up pregnant two weeks into the program and they had no health insurance. They managed to save for the cost of the childbirth and pay cash,” May said.
She added that no finalist ended up empty handed. Each family was guaranteed $2,500 for agreeing to have a film crew in their home twice a month and for sharing financial information with the public.
Some of the contestants took lessons learned from the show and applied them to financial situations later down the road. One of the families wanted to spend contest money on a trip to Disney World but found they did not have enough to take the entire family, so rather than resort to high interest rate loans or using credit cards, they decided to wait until they had enough saved to pay for the entire trip in cash.
It’s stories like that which May said made the contest such a huge success.
“The message about saving, paying down debt and sound fiscal policy was really what everyone got out of the Savings Challenge,” she said.
GECU has already finished taking applications for Savings Challenge ’08. The finalists will be announced by the end of January or February.
The experiences of three English-speaking families will be chronicled on KFOX-TV and the three Spanish-speaking families will be on KINT-TV. Both stations serve the local El Paso television market. Once again, the two families most closely achieving or exceeding their goals win $10,000. (c) 2007 The Credit Union Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.cujournal.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
