The Money Manager learning and activities go deeper with a stress on the difference between wants and needs and setting a savings goal for a want.

The badge program is addition to the much more widely known and older financial education the group has done through peddling snacks.

Girl Scouts started selling cookies nearly a century ago in 1917. With 50 million unique customers a year, this retail operation has a fan base roughly equivalent to Groupon and QVC.

The success of the youth group as a force in American commerce far outpaces its $800 million a year in cookie sales.

Nearly 80 percent of women small business owners once were troop members. Fortune 500 c-suite residents with Girl Scout time on their resumes include Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer, IBM Chairman and CEO Virginia Rometty, Lockheed Martin President and CEO Marilyn Hewson DuPont Chairman and CEO Ellen Kullman.

While none of the money girls earn from cookie sales goes into their own pockets, they do get to decide how the funds are spent that goes to their units.

The spending ranges from troop trips to charity. As one example of the latter, Brownies in Purvis, Mississippi, bought a handicapped accessible swing for a community playground with the fruits of their labor.

For the Boy Scouts, financial literacy is less of a cause. The group’s primary badge promoting education on saving and spending is called Personal Management. To earn it, a scout is required to set up a savings plan for a major family purchase and decide how to get the best deal. In addition, the teen sets a personal budget for 13 weeks.

Since 1972 when it was first offered, the Personal Management merit badge has been one of the most highly sought by Boy Scouts since it is a prerequisite to becoming an Eagle Scout.

In 2013, it ranked 11th in popularity among the 130 merit badges offered: immediately just below Family Life and just above Emergency Preparedness.

First Aid was number one with over 84,000 while Programming was at the bottom with 480.

Despite the increased clamor for financial literacy among the young, the number of Personal Management merit badges awarded last year dropped to 53,000 from 54,000 in 2012.

A Scout spokesperson defended the decline by saying there is a natural fluctuation in the numbers.