Beyond Personal Finance Course (online + print workbook)

Don’t let your students learn about money the hard way! Beyond Personal Finance was created to teach teens about money and the future. Your students will be presented with real-life scenarios from graduation to retirement (ages 22-42) based on common life experiences and decisions. They will design their future by choosing a career, a car, an apartment, a spouse, a house, investments, and more. Will their avatar be set for retirement?  This one-semester ½ credit course has 20 weekly lessons to complete.

The Student Textbook comes with access codes to class portals that contain 20- to 30-minute instructional videos and PDFs of homework pages. The Teacher Resources include a 5-minute coaching video for each lesson as well as lesson plans and ideas for lesson extensions. Both the student and teacher portals are easy to access and come with a 1-year subscription once activated. There is a printed copy of the Teacher Guide available that is an exact replica of the student textbook but with the answers included in the blanks. It does not include access codes; those are only found in the student textbook. 

Since Beyond Personal Finance was such a hit, the publisher recently came out with a version for elementary students called Before Personal Finance for ages 8-12 to introduce money concepts they will experience during their late teens and early twenties. These include issues such as smart spending, saving, investing, and borrowing. There are 10 lessons, and each will take 2 hours to complete. You may choose to do it all in one day or split it up over a week. Each lesson is divided into four parts – teaching, activity, scene, and quiz. Each lesson will also highlight one of ten different people who had influence in the finance world.

Your student will start by reading the 2-page teaching for each lesson out of the Student Workbook. After the teaching material is read, your student will complete an activity designed to extend the learning on the topic taught. Now enters the scene for each chapter. Students will be making choices for their “future you avatar” as it changes from 13 to 22. They will make choices to budget the scenario presented to them and their balance will carry into the next lesson. A plot twist wheel is spun once per lesson to reveal unexpected financial events that can occur. Students will learn about ten different people, one each lesson, who had influence in the finance world. The lessons end with a comprehension quiz containing ten multiple choice questions. Answers are found on the Teacher Resources page on the website that can be accessed with the QR code or by typing in the URL in the table of contents. Other resources include the spinning wheel, extra copies of the budget pages, suggested grade book, and much more.