Banking · Saving · Worksheet Activity
Understanding Your Money Habits
A reflection-based lesson that helps students identify and examine their own spending, saving, and sharing habits — classify them as helpful or harmful, and develop strategies to build better financial behaviors. Designed for high school and young adult settings.
What Students Learn
Learning objectives
- How to identify their current money habits across spending, saving, and sharing
- How to distinguish between helpful and harmful financial habits and explain why
- What the positive and negative consequences of specific money habits look like over time
- How to identify practical steps to replace a harmful habit with a more constructive one
- How money values and personal attitudes shape everyday financial decisions
For Teachers
How to use this lesson
This activity works well as a unit opener for a saving or personal finance module. Students begin by listing their own money habits — spending decisions, saving behaviors, how they handle money they receive as gifts or income. After listing habits, they classify each as helpful or harmful and discuss the consequences of each.
Provide a few examples to help students get started: buying an item on impulse at a sale, or saving a set amount from every dollar earned. A class discussion about positive and negative habits, followed by a “replacement habit” brainstorm for each negative item, gives the lesson its practical payoff. Best used with Grades 9–12 and young adult education settings.
Lesson Plan
Understanding your money habits — full lesson plan
Objective
- Students will describe their positive and negative money habits.
- Students will understand the difference between wise and unwise habits.
- Students will identify ways to improve their spending decisions and behavior.
Materials needed
- The printable Money Habits worksheet (below)
- Paper and pens
Procedure
Identify habits. Hand out the worksheet. Students list the money habits they currently have related to spending, saving, and sharing. Offer a few examples to get them started — buying an item just because it’s on sale, or saving $1 from every $10 they earn.
Classify. Students mark each habit as good or bad and explain the reason why.
Discussion. As a class, discuss the positive and negative habits: What are the positive consequences of the good habits? What are the negative consequences of the bad ones?
Improve. For each bad habit, students identify what they could do to improve it or replace it with a more positive habit.
The lesson activity above is free to use. The printable worksheet below is available with Full Membership.
Printable Worksheet · Full Membership
Money Habits — Printable Worksheet
A printable worksheet that helps students list their spending, saving, and sharing habits and identify which ones are helping or hurting them.
Related Topics
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