Teaching Resources · Projects
Personal Finance Projects for High School Students
Applied money projects students hand in — a budget they built, an apartment they priced, a tax year they settled — with the teacher materials to run and mark them: 10 of them close the units of the Money Instructor curriculum, one closes the whole course, and two more stand on their own.
What you can run without a membership
Most of what is on this page is part of a Full Membership, and the rest of it says so plainly. This section is the part that is not: one abridged but complete-in-itself sample project, and the free documents that let you judge the others before deciding.
First Apartment Budget Pack — free sample Free account
4 pages: the walkthrough page that sets up the task, then 2 of the pack’s worksheets, whole and unabridged — what it costs to get the keys, and money in against money out. A class can work straight through it as printed. It needs a free Money Instructor account, not a membership.
Get the free sample (PDF) The complete 10-page pack — 8 worksheets and a worked teacher answer key — is Full Membership. See what is in it.- Every unit’s pacing guide is a free download, with no login at all. It shows the five days of the unit and where its project falls, so you can see what the project asks for before deciding whether the unit is worth it. One is linked from each of the 10 unit pages below.
- The Cottage Budget project’s lesson plan is free to read in full. Objectives, vocabulary, materials and the whole classroom procedure are on its page, and a teacher with their own price list could run it from that alone. The printable packet itself is Full Membership.
- The free pre-tests tell you whether a project is the right level. Every unit has one, and there is a whole-course diagnostic, on the tests and assessments page.
Something the student produces, not something they complete
Not “harder worksheets”, and not “worksheets have right answers and projects do not” — there is plenty of arithmetic in these, and it is either right or it is not. What makes them projects is that one scenario runs the whole way through: the student makes choices inside it, each choice constrains the next, they have to justify what they picked, and they hand in one finished piece of work rather than a set of separate answers. The rubric marks the reasoning alongside the figures.
The 10 curriculum projects run to 108 pages between them and are worth 20, 24 or 40 points depending on the unit — the point total is the one printed on each paper, not a house standard, so the figure on each card below is the figure your students will see. 7 of the 10 finish the same way: having worked the whole thing through on someone else’s numbers, the student is asked to do it again on their own.
7 of the 10 are written for grades 9–12; the other 3 start earlier and still run to grade 12. Each card states its own band.
A project at the end of every unit of the curriculum
Each of these closes a five-day unit and is designed to be taken on its own: the project comes with the unit, and the unit page has the teacher guide, the answer key and the rubric that mark it. Nothing here needs the unit before it, so a project can be lifted out on its own. Where a teacher guide states how long its project runs, the figure is on the card; 3 of the 10 do not say, and none is guessed at here.
Before you set one: the last section
7 of the 10 finish by asking the student to redo the work on their own figures — their own month, their own path, their own three numbers. That is what makes the transfer real, and it is also the section to think about before you set it, because for some students the honest answer involves their family’s money.
2 of those 7 print the rule on the page itself — estimates are fine, and do not write account numbers, card numbers, usernames or Social Security numbers anywhere. The others do not, so say it yourself. Every one of these sections works with invented figures: the rubric marks the reasoning and the arithmetic, and nothing downstream checks whether the numbers were the student’s real ones. Telling a class up front that they may use a made-up household is the difference between a good discussion and a quiet child.
Your First Banking Setup
- 1Choose your savings goal. Name a specific dollar amount and a deadline
- 2Compare three banks. Use Appendix A. Pick a checking account and a savings account
- 3Run your first month. Record 12 transactions, then reconcile against the bank statement in Appendix C
- 4Reflect. Answer five short prompts in complete sentences
Build Your First Real Monthly Budget
- 1Read & compute. Read Sam’s pay stub and explain why net pay is less than gross
- 2Plan the 50/30/20. Compute Sam’s needs, wants, and savings dollar targets
- 3Build the monthly budget. Fill in specific dollar amounts for needs, wants, and savings, and confirm they add up to Sam’s monthly net
- 4Handle the unplanned + reflect. Decide how to cover a surprise $120 textbook expense, then answer four reflection prompts
Size It, Build It, Test It
Ends with a section using the student’s own figures
- 1Sort the month. Decide which of Amara’s expenses are essential, and defend four hard calls
- 2Size the fund. Build two targets and explain why they are so far apart
- 3Find the money. Redirect spending and recompute the timeline
- 4Choose the account. Match the account to the job and defend it against the alternatives
- 5Three years later. Project the fund with annual compounding and compare it to simple interest
- 6The stress test. An emergency hits. Spend the fund and rebuild it
- 7Your own plan. Do it again with your own numbers
Price Your Path
Ends with a section using the student’s own figures
- 1Two job offers. Compare them on headline pay, then on total compensation
- 2One award letter. Separate the aid that is given from the aid that is earned or repaid
- 3Price the training year. What the year actually costs and what comes in
- 4Two paths, seven years. Find the year the answer flips
- 5Your own path. Do it with a path you are actually considering
Same Tax, Three Answers
Ends with a section using the student’s own figures
- 1One week, two piles. What leaves, and which part could come back
- 2The year at full size. The same week, times fifty-two
- 3Settling up. One subtraction
- 4The dial. The same year, three W-4 choices
- 5No dial at all. What happens when nobody withholds
- 6Your own year
Make Your First Credit Decision
- 1Read a statement. Annotate the key sections of Riley’s sample credit card statement
- 2Compare three card offers. Use Appendix A. Fill in a 7-feature comparison table
- 3Choose one card + defend. Three sentences citing a specific feature AND Riley’s situation
- 4Plan responsible use + handle a surprise. Three rules of responsible use + a 4-step plan for an unrecognized $75 charge
- 5Reflect. Three short-answer prompts, then a SMART goal of your own
Three Numbers
Ends with a section using the student’s own figures
- 1The price on the sign. What the listing says, and what it leaves out
- 2The cash to get in. Everything owed before the keys change hands
- 3The cost to keep it. Rent plus everything that arrives with it
- 4The same three questions, about a car
- 5Both at once. What the whole picture requires
- 6Your own three numbers
Same Risks, Three Wallets
Ends with a section using the student’s own figures
- 1The person, and the five risks
- 2Wallet A: they could produce $200 this week
- 3Wallet B: they could produce $900 this week
- 4Wallet C: they could produce $6,000 this week
- 5The comparison
- 6Your own wallet
If This Goes Wrong
Ends with a section using the student’s own figures
- 1The month on one page. Every payment, and which rail it took
- 2Choosing the rail. Four payments, and the rail you would pick for each
- 3When a charge is wrong. Whose money is missing while it gets sorted out
- 4The rail test. Write the test, then use it on something real
- 5The slow leak. The money nobody took
- 6Your own month
Finish the Chain
Ends with a section using the student’s own figures
- 1Warm-up, before you read anything about this person
- 2Link 1: which of this money can be invested at all
- 3Link 2: a place to put it, with the best option removed
- 4Link 3: what the account actually says
- 5Link 4: what leaves without them deciding
- 6The year, both ways
- 7Your own chain
Your First Year On Your Own — the capstone
Your First Year On Your Own Full Membership
22 pages, 60 questions, 100 points, grades 9–12. 10 lettered sections, one per unit of the course, plus two that belong to no single unit. It comes with a 13-page teacher guide, and that guide sets it out over 2 to 3 weeks with a 5-session plan — roughly three sections a period, then the two course-level parts in class.
The sections do not feed each other — they compete. Every claim the student makes lands on the same take-home pay, and there is not enough of it. That is what makes it a course project rather than ten unit projects stapled together, and it is also why a teacher who taught six units can delete the four sections they did not teach without anything else breaking.
Projects that do not belong to a unit
These two are self-contained. They assume nothing has been taught first, so they work as a one-off week, a substitute plan or an end-of-term piece.
Moving out: what a first apartment actually costs
The same project in two formats, so you can pick the one your room can run. The printable pack is 10 pages and needs no devices; the spreadsheet workbook does the arithmetic live in Excel or Google Sheets, so a student can change the rent and watch the verdict change. Both start from the same question and both have a free sample.
- Move-In Cost Tracker
- Monthly Cost-of-Living Worksheet
- Monthly Living Budget
- Can You Afford It?
- Roommate Expense Agreement
- Apartment Comparison Activity
- Get Ready to Move Out: Savings Plan
- Teacher Answer Key & Worked Example
Cottage Budget Project Full Membership
Students design and finish a 16-foot-square cottage against a fixed budget, working from a construction price list: choose the roofing, insulation, flooring, windows and mechanical systems, work out the quantities for 256 square feet, total it, and justify what they picked. It is a cost-benefit project that happens to be about a building, and it is the one project here that runs over several periods.
The lesson plan — objectives, vocabulary, materials and the full procedure — is free to read. The 7-page printable packet, which carries the price list, the budgeting exercise and the review activity, is Full Membership.
The same work, marked for you
Some of this work also exists as software, in Money Instructor Classroom. You assign it to a class, students work in their own accounts, and you get a results dashboard instead of a pile of paper. The first two below are budgeting projects in the same sense as the printable ones; the third is a class banking system rather than a project, and is listed because teachers usually meet it in the same breath. All are included with a Full Membership on the teacher side; students need nothing but the class code.
- Budget SimulatorOne period, scored. Build a month, survive five surprise events, get a report. There is a class summary and a per-student view.
- Budget PlannerA budget the student keeps and edits month after month, with planned figures against what actually happened.
- MI BankA class banking system that runs all term — accounts, paydays, bills and an in-bank ATM.
Money Instructor Classroom is a separate student-facing site. Nothing on this page needs it, and none of the printable projects refer to it. See the classroom simulations page for what it does.
Three things teachers reach for instead, and what they actually are
These come up in the same searches and they are good, but none of them is a project, so they are not listed above. Each is what its own file says it is.
Make It to Payday is a print-and-play board game. Everyone plays the same month and the cards move dates rather than amounts, so a player who misses a bill cannot blame the deck. Free sample, full game with a membership.
Grocery Budget & Unit Price Challenge is a leveled worksheet packet with a shopping task in it, for grades 3–8 — three difficulty levels of the same challenge, plus an answer key.
Understanding Your Paycheck and its siblings are teaching packets: a concept page, a labeled specimen document, three leveled worksheets and a key. They teach the thing a project then asks students to do.
What is free, and what a membership covers
Two of the free-sample projects on this page need a free Money Instructor account — no payment, no card. Pacing guides, pre-tests and the Cottage Budget lesson plan need nothing at all. The 10 unit projects, the capstone, the complete apartment pack and workbook and the Cottage Budget packet are part of a Full Membership, along with the teacher guides, answer keys and rubrics that mark them.
Each project’s marking materials come with its unit rather than as a separate purchase, which is why the unit page — not this page — is where the download lives. The curriculum hub lists everything each unit includes. Every download link above goes through the same door: signed in with the right membership you get the file, and signed out you get the sign-in page rather than the file.
Written for the United States, and designed to avoid figures that expire. The money is US dollars and the paperwork is US paperwork — W-4, W-2, 1040, and the Social Security and Medicare lines on a pay stub. Two projects state a figure that comes from federal law rather than from their own scenario: the FICA rates (6.2% and 1.45%, 7.65% together) and, under the Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA), the $50 ceiling on a cardholder’s liability for unauthorized credit-card charges — which is a different thing from a billing-error dispute, where what matters is the 60-day written-notice deadline. Those change by act of Congress, not on a calendar. What you will not find anywhere in these projects is a figure that is reissued every year: no standard deduction, no tax bracket, no contribution limit, no filing deadline, no interest rate presented as the current one. Every other dollar figure belongs to the scenario the student is working, which is what stops a printed project going out of date in January. Rules, forms and terminology do still change, and none of this is a substitute for current guidance from the IRS or the CFPB — where a current-year figure is genuinely needed, the worksheet generators carry it and print it on the student’s own sheet.