Budgeting: Mastering Your Money

This comprehensive budgeting lab will help students master budgeting skills and is crucial for their financial well-being. This lab is not just theoretical knowledge but is filled with a lot of interactive activities and practical scenarios. Students will go through simulations and hands-on exercises that simulate real-life financial scenarios.

The lab is divided into four sections

1. Basics of Budgeting
2. Budgeting Factors
3. Building Your Budget
4. Conclusion

Please take a look at the outline tab to see the activities included in each section.

Each section is preceded and followed by a review and classroom discussion materials that teachers can use.

Some of the core activities are -

Basics of Budgeting

• A quick start activity to allocate the salary of a person into different expenses
• Introduction to budgeting and drag-and-drop activity to classify expenses.
• Understanding discretionary and non-discretionary budgets and categorizing expenses worksheet.
• Analyzing John's budget
• Budgeting strategies such as 50/30/20, zero-based budgeting, etc., and an interactive worksheet to create a zero-based budget.
• Introduction to Needs & Wants and an interactive worksheet to choose their choices on different categories such as housing, food, entertainment etc.

Budgeting Factors

• Analyze American's average monthly expenses
• Dive deeper into housing expenses with worksheet activities on rent analysis etc.
• Dive deeper into transportation expenses with worksheet activities to analyze transportation modes, calculate total car ownership cost, etc.
• Dive deeper into food expenses with worksheet activities on the USDA food calculator, average food expense analysis, etc.
• Impact of inflation on budgeting with a worksheet that includes an inflation calculator.
• Comparison-shopping and activity to do comparison shopping.

Building Your Budget

• Help Sarah - a fictitious character, to build her budget by using
• Interactive worksheet to choose a career - analyze education loan required, salary, sample monthly paycheck, etc.
• Interactive worksheet to set short and long-term goals
• Interactive worksheet to build the final budget based on the salary and goals.
• Students will create their budget for a semester.

Conclusion

• Write a letter to parents explaining the importance of budgeting.
• Feedback

By providing an interactive learning experience, we equip students with the necessary skills to navigate the complexities of personal finance confidently.