Personal finance simulation games
The following links provide detailed descriptions and reviews of, along with discussion questions for, personal finance simulation games.
"Build Your Stax" personal finance game - You have 20 years to make as much money as you can through seven different types of investments. As the game goes on, you'll be confronted with unexpected expenses that pop up in real, everyday life, costs like home repairs, family emergencies, and speeding tickets. Sometimes, you might gain money unexpectedly, too, like winning a prize or contest, or finding money on the ground.
"Time for Payback" personal finance game - Your ultimate goal is to survive to the end of the game, meaning you graduated college, managed to juggle all your priorities, and found employment with a starting salary that adequately covers all the debt you accumulated during your college years through your various choices and decisions. Will you make it?
"PlaySpent.org" personal finance game - Can you survive financially for one month? This is a very eye-opening, thought-provoking simulation. The decisions you'll have to make, and the situations you'll encounter, mirror everyday real life for a lot of people. You'll learn a lot about yourself, including your spending habits, your goals and ambitions, how you reason through decisions, and what you're willing, or not willing, to sacrifice.
"Monopoly" as a personal finance game - On the surface, it may appear that Monopoly is an awesome game when it comes to teaching entrepreneurship, and it is, right? But Monopoly is also wonderful at teaching us some things about personal finance, if we dig a little deeper.
Essays and reflections on the benefits of living simply, saving, and strategizing
The Minimalists - Meet The Minimalists, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, who present a compelling case that getting rid of all the clutter in your life - the clothes you never wear; all the stuff in your basement, closets, and/or storage unit you're not using; the long hours you're working and mounds of debt you're taking on in order to keep up appearances and look "successful" to all your friends, neighbors, co-workers, and perhaps even family members ("Keeping up with the Joneses"), etc., etc. - can help you live a more meaningful, purposeful life. Learn a little bit about their personal journeys and how they, in turn, learned these valuable lessons in some pretty hard ways.
Dave Ramsey and The Minimalists - Learn how personal finance guru the legendary Dave Ramsey approaches the subject of money in comparison to The Minimalists. We'll discover that they arrive at the same conclusions, but perhaps just take slightly different perspectives to get there.
Building your own personal economy - Written in May 2020. If the coronavirus pandemic can teach us anything from a financial standpoint, it's that we each need to focus on building our own personal economies. We can't trust, or rely on, other people, politicians, or broken-down systems to do that for us.
Strategies for saving money
The envelope budgeting system - a timeless, classic strategy for easily paying the bills while paying yourself - if you're willing to cultivate and maintain a little discipline.
Browse our "Shopping" category - a collection of previous blog posts offering all sorts of tips and strategies on how to save money on groceries, dining out, car insurance, cell phone expenses, Christmas gifts, and a lot more!
30 Easy Ways to Save Up to $1,000 - presented by Dave Ramsey and his team
How to Save Money: 22 Simple Tips - presented by Dave Ramsey and his team
How to Save Money Fast - presented by Dave Ramsey and his team
Complete personal finance curriculum for your classroom
Next Gen Personal Finance
Practical Money Skills - sponsored by Visa
Practical Money Skills curriculum for students with special needs
Personal finance vocabulary
Personal finance vocabulary list - a good starter list for high school students of common vocabulary terms, along with brief definitions and practical examples for each word.
Difference between stocks and bonds - a great blog post with easy-to-understand explanations about these two different forms of investments.
Living on your own, paying taxes, credit cards, understanding your paycheck, more
Getting Started Teaching Personal Finance - an awesome article written for Edutopia by Kailen Stover, a family and consumer sciences teacher in Colorado. From the article: "Lessons on credit and credit cards, taxes, and how to find an apartment and make the rent are invaluable for high school students. Here is a beginner’s guide to building hands-on and real-world opportunities into personal finance education."
Anatomy of a paycheck - a great video lesson, only a little over five minutes long, given by Sal Khan over at Khan Academy. In this video, Sal breaks down all the expenses and deductions that come with your paycheck. You may have heard of, or have already used, Khan Academy before. Launched by Sal himself, a Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) –educated former hedge fund analyst, the Khan Academy is a free online education platform. The Web site features an extensive variety of courses and tutorials in areas like math, science and engineering, computer programming, arts and humanities, economics and finance, test prep, career exploration, the college admissions process, and a lot more. Within the economics and finance course offerings, Khan has a subcategory devoted to entrepreneurship, featuring exclusive interviews and conversations he conducts with top entrepreneurs and business leaders.
If your school/district or home/family has a BrainPOP subscription, look these subjects up on BrainPOP for great video lessons, quizzes, games, and other learning activities:
- Credit Cards
- Taxes
- Budgets
- Comparing Prices
- Mortgages
- Debt
- Banking
- Interest
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