For Michigan Teachers · Standards Alignment
Michigan’s Personal Finance Content Expectations, Mapped to a Ready-to-Teach Course
Michigan requires students to complete a personal finance course to graduate. This page sets out what the law asks for, lists all 8 of the state’s grades 9–12 personal finance expectations, and shows for each one whether our 10 classroom-ready units cover it fully, in part, or not at all — with the partial rows naming exactly what is missing.
The Requirement
What Michigan actually requires
Under House Bill 5190 (2022), signed June 16, 2022 and written into Section 380.1278a of the Revised School Code, Michigan students must complete one-half credit in personal finance to earn a diploma. It applies to students entering 8th grade in 2023 and thereafter — the class of 2028 — so the students it binds are in high school now and districts are choosing what to teach them.
The half credit does not add an eighteenth credit to the diploma. At the local board’s discretion it may substitute for one-half of the mathematics requirement, for part of the world language requirement, or for part of the visual, performing and applied arts requirement, and it may be earned inside an approved career and technical education program. MDE’s course and credit guidance sets out those options and who may teach the course.
The content is set by the Personal Finance 9-12 Content Expectations (Michigan Merit Curriculum, v5/2023), developed by the Michigan Department of Education and approved by the State Board of Education. It is short: 8 content expectations in total, each a single broad sentence. That brevity is why this page reads them clause by clause — one Michigan expectation routinely asks for four to six separate things, and whether a course meets it is a question about each of those clauses rather than about the expectation as a whole.
Check every detail against Michigan’s own sources: MCL 380.1278a, the content expectations themselves, and MDE’s personal finance page. Districts differ in how they schedule the half credit and which existing course carries it, so confirm your own building’s plan before you build a syllabus around it.
The Course
10 units, 50 days, written to be taught in order
10 five-day units, 50 class periods of core instruction. How much of a semester that is depends on your building: on an every-other-day block, where a semester is roughly 45 to 50 meetings, the units fill it; on a traditional daily period, where a semester runs nearer 90, they are the spine and the course tests and the gap material below fill the rest. Plan the schedule against your own calendar rather than against this figure.
Every unit ships a free pacing guide, pre-quiz and vocabulary sheet that need no account, so you can read the objectives this crosswalk is built from before deciding anything. The full teacher kit — teacher guide, student packet, quizzes, unit project, final assessment, editable slides and the complete ZIP — comes with Full Membership.
Each card shows how many Michigan expectations that unit carries, fully or in part. A standard taught by two units is counted on both, so these add to 17 rather than to the 8 standards the course addresses.
The Crosswalk
All 8 expectations, and how far the course covers each one
8 of the 8 expectations are addressed by a unit — 1 fully and 7 in part. Not one is left uncovered, and not one is complete on its own. Standard codes and wording below are reproduced from Michigan Merit Curriculum: Personal Finance 9-12 Content Expectations (v5/2023).
How to read the third column. A unit is listed against a standard only where its published pacing-guide objectives support it, so every row here is one you can check yourself against a free PDF. Fully means those objectives support the standard’s main clause and every requirement it names outside its “e.g.” examples. Partly means they support the main clause but not one or more named requirements — and the row says which, so you know exactly what to supplement. It is a strict rule, applied the same way; the member materials in each unit go further than the free guide advertises, so treat this as the floor, not the ceiling.
Michigan states its expectations as eight broad paragraphs rather than as a coded list, so the useful unit here is the clause: each row below names the parts of its expectation the units carry and the parts they do not.
One thing to keep in mind when reading those two columns. Michigan states its requirement as eight broad expectations, where other states write sixty or more granular ones, and each Michigan expectation names four to six separate things at once. So a strict reading produces very few Fully rows and almost no uncovered ones — not because the course is stronger or weaker here, but because a single row is carrying what another state would write as six. The note on each partial row is the finding; the column totals are not a like-for-like comparison with another state’s page.
Personal Finance Content Expectations · The content expectations Michigan students must be proficient in before graduation, developed by the Michigan Department of Education and approved by the State Board of Education under Section 380.1278a of the Revised School Code.
| Content expectation | What it asks for | Where the course covers it |
|---|---|---|
| PF1 Earning Income |
Conduct research regarding potential income and employee benefit packages, non-income factors that may influence career choice, benefits, and costs of obtaining the necessary education or technical skills, taxes a person is likely to pay, and other possible sources of income. | PartlyCareers & Paying for Education · Taxes & First Filing · Budgeting & First PaycheckNot covered here: Two of the named requirements are absent. No published objective covers the non-income factors that may influence a career choice — interests, values, hours, working conditions — and among “other possible sources of income” the units reach interest and investment earnings but not government income support, Social Security or inheritances. |
| PF2 Buying Goods and Services |
Describe the factors that consumers may consider when purchasing a good or service, including the costs, benefits, and the role of government in obtaining the information. | PartlyRenting & Major Purchases · Budgeting & First PaycheckNot covered here: The role of government in making purchase information available — disclosure rules, labeling, the agencies that require them — is named by the expectation and appears in no published objective. |
| PF3 Budgeting and Saving |
Identify the incentives people have to set aside income for future consumption and evaluate the impact of time, interest rates, and inflation upon the value of savings. | PartlySaving & Emergency Funds · Budgeting & First Paycheck · Banking & CheckingNot covered here: Inflation is named alongside time and interest rates as one of the three things that act on the value of savings, and no published objective covers it. A Michigan reviewer should expect to supplement that directly. |
| PF4 Using Credit |
Evaluate the benefits, costs, and potential impacts of using credit to purchase goods and services. | FullyCredit & Borrowing |
| 4.1 Paying for education after high school |
Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), Student Loans, Scholarships, Work Study and Grants | PartlyCareers & Paying for EducationNot covered here: Scholarships, grants, work study and student loans are all covered, but the FAFSA itself is not: no published objective has students complete or file the application. The unit starts one step later, at the award letter the application produces. |
| PF5 Financial Investing |
Analyze the risks, expected rate of return, tax benefits, the impact of inflation, the role of government agencies, and the importance of diversification when investing in financial assets. | PartlyInvesting & Long-Term GrowthNot covered here: This is the thinnest row on the page and it is deliberate. Five of the six things the expectation names are not in any published objective: expected rate of return, tax benefits, the impact of inflation, the role of government agencies, and the importance of diversification. The unit prints no rate of return and no growth projection on purpose, so it stays accurate without annual revision — which is the right call for a unit and leaves a real gap against this expectation. Plan to supplement it. |
| PF6 Protecting and Insuring |
Assess the financial risk of lost income, assets, health, or identity, and determine if a person should accept the risk exposure, reduce risk, or transfer the risk to others by paying a fee now to avoid the possibility of a larger loss later. | PartlyInsurance & Risk · Modern Payments, Scams & Fraud · Saving & Emergency Funds · Banking & CheckingNot covered here: Health is one of the four kinds of loss the expectation names and no published objective covers health coverage specifically. The units teach the risk framework and read a generic policy, which applies to a health policy, but a reviewer asking where health insurance is taught will not find a day. |
| PF7 Paying Taxes |
Identify and evaluate taxes a person is likely to pay, including federal, state, and local taxes, tax benefits and drawbacks, impacts on take-home pay, types of IRS tax forms, and how these can affect their taxes. | PartlyTaxes & First Filing · Budgeting & First PaycheckNot covered here: State and local taxes are named by the expectation and no published objective covers either. Michigan levies a state income tax, and a number of Michigan cities levy their own on top of it, so this is the gap a Michigan reviewer is most likely to test. |
The Gaps
Nothing here is left untouched — but nothing is complete either
On most state crosswalks this section lists the standards no unit carries. Michigan has none: every one of the 8 expectations is addressed at least in part, because each is broad enough that a ten-unit course is bound to reach some of it. That is not the same as meeting them. 1 of 8 is covered end to end; the other 7 each have named parts the published objectives do not reach, and those are set out row by row in the table above. Read the “Not covered here” notes as your supplement list — on this state they are the whole finding.
For Your Documentation
Using this in a curriculum map
Copy the standard codes straight from the table into your planning documents. Each unit’s own page lists its five daily objectives, and the free pacing guide prints them in a one-page table you can attach to a curriculum map or hand to a department head.
If you also report against the national frameworks, the Jump$tart and CEE crosswalk maps the same library to those. For placement and end-of-course evidence, the assessments hub lists the free course diagnostic and the unit and course tests.
Teach the whole course
The pacing guides, pre-quizzes and vocabulary sheets are free and need no account. Full Membership adds every teacher guide, student packet, quiz, unit project, final assessment and editable slide deck across all 10 units, plus the worksheet generators and printables the units point to.
See membership options →Keep Planning