Students will examine current personal money management habits by answering budgeting questions. This activity can help students realize that they are “throwing away” or saving real money based on their choices and actions. You could collect the money that “costs” them and add up the total class amount “spent” on making poor budgeting decisions. Discuss as a class how much has been wasted. Ask the students to reflect on how much money they have left. Did they “spend” all their money or end up with lots of money.

This collection features resources to support teaching Module 6C: Applying Personal Spending Plans from the Saskatchewan Financial Literacy curriculum.  In Round 1, students learn to allocate their "20 bean salary" according to which options they want to spend their beans on. Round 2 forces the students to reduce their salary to 13 beans and make decisions about where they should make their "cuts". Round 3 includes some "life happens" challenges that allow students to make more decisions on where to move the beans in order to deal with the situations. This activity completes with some reflection questions on how this activity relates to budgeting with real income.

This collection features resources to support teaching Module 6C: Applying Personal Spending Plans from the Saskatchewan Financial Literacy curriculum.This is a full project that can be used in Module 6C for Financial Literacy 30. This usually takes the students about 5 hours to complete and it is very comprehensive to cover all future spending. The assignment requires the students to "screenshot" proof of items they found for their budget (and support each item with evidence). Students really enjoy this project (and adults have used it too for budgeing in real life!). Students may chose to have $0 spending on some items (pets, legal, etc), but they should explain their reasoning for entering a zero. As well, students should enter savings  into their budget (at least 10% of earnings).

Budgeting is an important task for money managment. Using a spreadsheet can make this task much easier with tools that autocalculate totals. As well, the spreadsheet can be copied easily for each month or year. Categories can be easily tailored to the users' needs by adding items that are specifc to their financial situation.Budgets are used by non-profit groups, organizations, businesses, sports associations and volunteer groups for their cash flow management. Using a spreadsheet will make budgeting and decision making much easier and transparent for all users. Here is a variety of blank templates and examples that can be used for various budgeting purposes. 

This task allows the students to create a family’s cash flow budget based on their current situation, analyze strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to their household budget, and give the family some financial advice.The assignment also asked the students various planning questions regarding family budgets, events that affect the budget and variables to consider when a household plans their budgets.

This activity contains three case studies which allow students to evaluate situations that are considered when budgeting. The students will create budgets for the individuals in the cases as part of this assignment.

A variety of financial literacy lessons for grades Prek-12 and beyond. Visit each grade section for a full list of topics covered.

I use this assignment whenever I teach Personal Finance. There is no better way to teach budgeting skills and the power of money than to have the students track and record their spending for five months. This is probably the most powerful activity that I have used in teaching this course.