What do you need to know before buying a car? Aside from knowing what you want in a vehicle, you’ll need to know about budgeting and credit before you start shopping. Learn some car-buying basics in the February 2019 Page One Economics: Focus on Finance essay.

There are two sides to a budget—income and expenses. When asked how to best balance a budget, people often respond by saying to reduce or eliminate expenses. In this lesson, students choose a car and a housing option and, using these expenses, determine if the income they earn from the occupation they’ve chosen will be sufficient when other expenses are added. If they determine it is insufficient, they seek ways they could increase the income side of the budget by improving their human capital.

As the Rolling Stones song says, "You can't always get what you want." So we make choices. Every day, governments and individuals choose how much money to spend and what to purchase. The January 2013 issue discusses opportunity costs and scarcity and how they effect our spending decisions.

Students learn about the many types of expenses associated with building a bridge. Working like engineers, they estimate the cost for materials for a bridge member of varying sizes. After making calculations, they graph their results to compare how costs change depending on the use of different materials (steel vs. concrete). They conclude by creating a proposal for a city bridge design based on their findings.

No surprise—people with more education often earn higher incomes and are unemployed less than those with less education. Those with higher incomes also tend to accumulate more wealth. Why? Research shows that well-educated people tend to make financial decisions that help build wealth. Their strategies, though, can be used by anyone.

This document is a history of the challenges of starting an FTC Robotics Program as a class (as opposed to a club). The intended audience includes anyone who is thinking of starting an FTC Robotics program whether class or club. The reason “FTC” is specifically mentioned is that involvement with a major national program has many positive (and negative) aspects. The goal of this document is to provide the reader a compendium of all the problems (and posited solutions) we encountered.

The FYE 105: Financial Literacy Curriculum Unit was developed for use in a First-Year Experience course to provide students with an understanding of: the relationship between human capital development and potential income and the chances of staying employed; budgeting; credit cards; and credit rights and responsibilities. The curriculum was implemented in an urban community college FYE course and was successful. We provide the curriculum for others who may wish to use it in a similar course.

During this engineering design/build project, students investigate many different solutions to a problem. Their design challenge is to find a way to get school t-shirts up into the stands during home sporting events. They follow the steps of the engineering design process to design and build a usable model, all while keeping costs under budget.

Students learn that money is a medium of exchange that facilitates economic activity. Next, students learn the relationship between the money supply and inflation by participating in an inflation auction using gold and silver notes to better understand the historic debate of the Free Silver Movement. Students then read William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech to relate the historical context. The students use historical data to calculate income, fixed expenses, and variable expenses of a farmer to further understand the historical argument presented by the Free Silver Movement. Finally, students analyze two political cartoons against the Free Silver Movement. This lesson includes primary source documents obtained from FRASER¨.

Students will work within a budget to find pieces of furniture to decorate their dorm room.

It's Your Paycheck! is designed for use in high school personal finance classes. The curriculum contains three sections: "Know Your Dough," "KaChing!" and "All About Credit." The lessons in each of these sections employ various teaching strategies to engage students so that they have opportunities to apply the concepts being taught. Each lesson includes black-line masters of the handouts and visuals needed to teach the lesson.

It's Your Paycheck! is designed to introduce personal finance content. Course participants learn about a variety of personal finance topics including the link between education and income, budgeting, the benefits of saving, and credit reports. These learning modules will help participants make sense of W-2s, W-4s, pay -day Loans and APRs in an interactive online format. It's Your Paycheck! consists of nine individual programs that can be used together or individually to enhance personal finance learning.

This activity card is meant to be a self-paced lesson showing users how to create a budget.

This activity was originally developed by Intel® as part of the Intel® Learn Easy Steps program.

In this lesson, students discover the entire process that goes into designing a rocket for any customer. In prior lessons, students learned how rockets work, but now they learn what real-world decisions engineers have to make when designing and building a rocket. They learn about important factors such as supplies, ethics, deadlines and budgets. Also, students learn about the Engineering process, and recognize that the first design is almost never the final design. Re-Engineering is a critical step in creating a rocket.

This lesson focuses on developing basic money management skills for adults. The specific time focus for these skills is on multiple months to years. The intended audience is for adults ages 18 and above.The lesson will include elements of reading and writing and listening, and will focus on authentic texts, videos, facts and figures cited from expert research and reports.This lesson will help learners comprehend different money management skills, and help them to understand how to apply them in a long term timeframe.These skills can be used in both a personal sense as well as for business.

This lesson focuses on developing basic money management skills for adults. The specific time focus for these skills is on multiple months to years. The intended audience is for adults ages 18 and above.The lesson will include elements of reading and writing and listening, and will focus on authentic texts, videos, facts and figures cited from expert research and reports.This lesson will help learners comprehend different money management skills, and help them to understand how to apply them in a long term timeframe.These skills can be used in both a personal sense as well as for business.

This is a three-credit course which covers topics that enhance the students’ problem solving abilities, knowledge of the basic principles of probability/statistics, and guides students to master critical thinking/logic skills, geometric principles, personal finance skills. This course requires that students apply their knowledge to real-world problems. A TI-84 or comparable calculator is required. The course has four main units: Thinking Algebraically, Thinking Logically and Geometrically, Thinking Statistically, and Making Connections. This course is paired with a course in MyOpenMath which contains the instructor materials (including answer keys) and online homework system with immediate feedback. All course materials are licensed by CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.