Budget Project: Financial Literacy Application

Description:

While one of our goals as educators is to prepare students for independent living, many students feel overwhelmed, underprepared, and uneducated about the realities of how to begin. This project allows students to research costs of living on their own while exploring topics of: 

• Banking
• Housing - finding a living space, furnishing it, & paying for its utilities
• Food - creating a detailed meal plan, creating a shopping list, & calculating dining out costs
• Transportation - through private or public means
• Personal Spending - personal care, clothing, entertainment, pet expenses, & hobbies
• Budgeting for an emergency fund, investing, & charity

Along the way, you can discuss items like how they will do their laundry, what renters insurance is, and how their health insurance would be provided. 

At the completion of the project, students total these expenses to estimate a yearly personal cost of living. They examine their current or future employment to determine if their salary is enough to cover those expenses. Students then summarize their work through reflection pages identifying immediate, 5-year, & 10-year goals/plans, along with a synopsis of what they learned throughout the project. 

This project could be used in middle school or high school. My Applied Math students do this project the last 2 weeks of their senior year, right before graduation. Some students will be moving out in the near future, while some will attend college first. Either way, the timing of this project brings a relevancy to expenses they will be responsible for, shines light on topics they had never before considered, makes them examine their current spending habits, and allows them to see what kind of income they would need to meet these expenses. 

What is included: 

• Cover Page
• Banking Information
• Housing: Rental Properties
• Housing: Utilities
• Housing: Start Up Costs
• Food: Weekly Meal Plan
• Food: Grocery List
• Food: Dining Out
• Transportation
• Personal Spending
• Miscellaneous - Emergency Fund, Investing, Giving
• Jobs & Careers Info Page
• Reflections Page
• Grading Rubric

*All pages come as a pdf & in PowerPoint format so you can edit.

*The Reflections Pages also come in Google Doc format so you can post them in Google Classroom for easy completion by students.

*The Grading Rubric also comes as a Google Sheet to help in your grading.

You may also like: 

• Banking Unit
• Credit Card Unit

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Note for Intervention Specialists: 

Consider any of MathMotivation’s Applied Math resources for your students! The entire Applied Math curriculum has been tested out & is still currently being used for special education students on IEPs. Many of these students have spent three years in a resource room for high school math then entered into the general education inclusion setting for Applied Math their senior year. (*These students are not alternatively assessed.*) All of the Applied Math materials are great resources for general education & special education!

TERMS OF USE:

• This product is to be used by the original purchaser for use in his/her classroom only. Licenses are non-transferable and cannot be passed from one teacher to another. 
• Copying for more than one teacher or for an entire department, school, or district is prohibited. 
• Redistributing, editing, selling, or posting this item or any part thereof on the internet is strictly forbidden unless the site is password protected and can only be accessed by students, not other teachers or anyone else on the internet. 
• If you wish to share with colleagues, please purchase additional licenses. 

Read the full story of how necessity (of desperately seeking relevant, engaging, purposeful math lessons for non-college bound seniors who struggled with math their entire lives) became the mother of invention (the Applied Math Curriculum). Life-changing information, activities, and resources for math, personal finance, financial literacy, consumer science, and career tech classrooms, appropriate for middle school to high school students…. all at MathMotivations.com!