Sam is the big spender who covets a bicycle he cannot afford. Pam wants a soccer ball, but cannot bear to part with her ample savings.
Sam and Pam are hand puppets animated by Jill York, 25, a bookkeeper at Bank of Benton in Kentucky. They will perform at a Benton elementary school today as part of National Teach Children to Save Day, organized by the American Bankers Association's Education Foundation.
More than 2,500 bankers are planning to make presentations to 125,000 elementary school children in all 50 states. For a fee of $20, the ABA supplied bankers with lesson plans and publicity posters; videos and comic books also were available.
Ms. York says kids like Sam better because he has a funny voice. But they might not laugh so hard if they understood what happens to big-spender Sam in real life.
Although Kentucky accounts for less than 2% of bankruptcies in the United States, its filings increased 31.8% in 1996. Bankruptcies were filed by more than one million Americans last year, an increase of 25.9% from 1995 and more than triple the number in 1980.
Americans are poor savers, socking away less than half as much as Europeans and about a third as much as the Japanese.
Banks both large and small are joining the effort.
Employees of Bank of Benton, an employee-owned bank with three branches and assets of $230 million, will visit three classrooms today. Twenty-five associates from NationsBank Corp., which has assets of $239 billion and 2,600 branches, will visit about 1,000 students in Charlotte, N.C., classrooms. NationsBank pays its employees up to two hours a week for time spent on educational programs.
The lesson plans for Teach Children to Save Day even have found their way outside the United States to the National Commercial Bank of Grenada, a member of the ABA.
Donna Lander, the bank's managing director assistant, will use the lesson plan to promote a new savings account for customers under 16 at school next month. "We like to get them in early and establish a relationship," she said.
Student accounts are nothing new at Bank of Benton, a participant in the ABA Education Foundation's Personal Economics Program, a grassroots network of volunteers. Bank of Benton sets up savings accounts for fifth graders to accumulate "starbucks" in the "starbank" for good attendance and grades; they can use the credits to buy pencils and sweatshirts at a school- sponsored store.
At Marshall High School in Benton, students approve loans to classmates in genuine dollars. The student banking board recently raised the $100 credit limit on a trustworthy classmate so that she could buy a $200 class ring.
