Teaching Money Before College: Personal Finance at Home

Quick answer: One semester, about sixty hours, taught in eleventh or twelfth grade while your student still has your budget to look at. Start with values and goals, move to income and taxes, then banking, credit, insurance and investing. Use real numbers from your own household wherever you can stand to.

When is the right year to teach it?

Late. A fourteen-year-old will do the worksheets and forget them. A seventeen-year-old is about to sign a lease, take a loan or open a first credit card, and every lesson lands against something real.

Junior or senior year also lets you use documents that exist. A pay stub from a summer job. Your own utility bill. The financial aid letter from a college. Those beat any invented scenario, because the student cannot dismiss the numbers as made up.

What belongs in the course, in what order?

Start with the values unit even though it looks soft. A student who has written down what they actually want is far more willing to sit through amortization later. The Money Mindset Quiz is a single lesson and a reasonable first thing to try.

How do you make it stick rather than pass?

Attach every unit to a task with a consequence, even a small one.

• Open the bank account for real, in their name, and let them manage it.
• Give them one household bill to track for a month and report on.
• Have them price the same used car with three different loan terms and say which they would take.
• If they have earned income, help them open a Roth IRA and put fifty dollars in it. The account existing does more than a chapter on compounding.

Talking about your own money is the uncomfortable part. You do not have to disclose your salary. You can show the shape of things — what proportion goes to housing, what an insurance premium runs, what a mortgage statement looks like — and that is usually enough.

What goes wrong with personal finance materials?

• Numbers from 2011. Rent, tuition and interest rates in old worksheets are so far off that students stop believing the exercise. Check the figures in the preview.
• Products smuggled in as lessons. Some free curricula are written by financial firms and steer toward particular accounts. Ask who wrote it.
• Non-US tax and credit rules. Materials written elsewhere describe a different tax return and a different credit system. Look for W-4, 1040 and FICO named explicitly.
• All budgeting, no investing. Budgeting is the easy half to write and the least valuable over a lifetime.

Frequently asked questions

Does personal finance count as a math credit?

In some states it does, in others it counts as an elective or economics. Requirements vary by state, so check your own state's homeschool law before you build the transcript around it.

How long should the whole course take?

Sixteen to eighteen weeks at about three to four hours a week is a normal half-credit semester.

Can I teach it to two students at different ages together?

Yes for the values, budgeting and banking units. Credit and investing land better with the older one.

What if I am not confident about money myself?

Teach it anyway, and say so out loud. Working through a credit card statement together, both learning, is a more honest lesson than pretending you have it solved.

Related posts

• Homeschool High School Math Without Hiring a Tutor
• How Many Hours Make a Homeschool Credit? Planning a Defensible Year
• Editable or Print-Ready: What to Check Before You Buy