Arriving in your local area later this year is Economia: Money Matters, an 8,000-square foot traveling museum filled with interactive multimedia displays designed to take visitors on a personal finance journey. The financial literacy traveling museum is the brainchild of Gail Vida Hamburg, CEO and founder of Rainworks Omnimedia LLC, a Chicago, Illinois-based producer of multimedia science and natural history traveling museum exhibitions. “My company is introducing to the financial literacy canon an innovative medium of educating Americans about personal finance – an interactive, immersive, multimedia traveling museum exhibition,” said Hamburg. “Science, industry and natural history museums are where Americans go for informal learning and to understand new and unfamiliar phenomena.”

Hamburg said she got the idea for a traveling museum about money after seeing results from a recent financial literacy study. The research, led by Dr. Annamaria Lusardi, a noted expert on financial literacy at George Washington University, finds that nearly half of the households that participated in the study did not have the know-how to come up with $2,000 in 30 days for a financial emergency. This despite the hundreds of personal finance books, magazines, radio and television shows, and financial literacy programs available to consumers. “The fact that even solidly middle class people, nearly a quarter of the households surveyed with incomes of $100,000 to $150,000, could not come up with that amount is quite profound,” says Hamburg.

Economia: Money Matters traveling museum is designed to educate people on the principles and complexities of economics, money management and personal finances. The intent of the museum experience is to empower visitors to make prudent financial decisions and motivate them to establish a financial security plan for their future. Rainworks Omnimedia is collaborating with financial literacy and personal finance experts to develop the content for the museum. Interactive displays will simplify the intimidating areas of personal finances, among them college planning, retirement, compounding, spending and how the stock market works. In explaining the exhibits in the traveling museum, Hamburg said “visitors will learn about personal finance by journeying through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs with financial self-actualization as the goal. We will also weave deep metaphors that drive all human behavior into the design of the exhibition, including balance, control, and transformation.”

The six interactive, multimedia installations and display stations in the traveling museum include a Money On The Brain digital display on real time money fears; Cognition & Spending interactive display on the brain’s behavior when spending; Money Micro & Macro multimedia display on money’s impact on a personal, national and global level; Money In Motion film showing the journey of a dollar bill; Saving Rules for Life exhibit on saving vehicles and the power of compounding; and How the Stock Market Works multimedia exhibit explaining the stock market. There are also stations showing how to read credit reports, FICO scores, credit card statements, college loans, and mortgage and leasing contracts, spending rules to apply on whether you can afford a purchase, and money management habits of financially literate people. The traveling personal finance museum will be touring the North American museum circuit beginning in Fall 2011, with its debut in California.

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