Understanding personal finance is essential for students as they prepare for life beyond the classroom. The Bessie Moore Center offers a variety of financial literacy resources designed to equip students with the knowledge and skills needed to make informed financial decisions—now and in the future.
These resources cover critical topics such as navigating financial aid and scholarships, understanding credit card basics, budgeting wisely and even calculating a mortgage. With interactive lessons and real-world applications, students gain practical insight into managing money, building credit responsibly and planning for major life expenses. Whether you’re teaching high school seniors or first-year college students, these tools support lifelong financial well-being and informed economic participation.
Financial Literacy Online Resources
- Your Federal Student Loan
- What’s Up in Finance?
- Avoiding Charge Card Fraud
- Calculate YOUR Mortgage
- Credit Card Basics
- Financial Calculators — provided by Ignitespot Outsourced Accounting
- EconEd: Check out this collection of resources aligned with specific economic concepts. These concepts correspond to the National Standards for Economics, offering a variety of lesson plans, activities, and multimedia materials suitable for K–12 educators.
Personal Finance Resources
Are you an educator seeking high-quality personal finance resources? Discover the Personal Finance Playbook—a comprehensive toolkit packed with curated materials to support your planning and instruction. Inside, you’ll find a variety of resources to help you design impactful assignments, engaging activities, and effective assessments, all centered around key personal finance concepts.
SPENT
SPENT is an interactive, browser-based simulation in which you try to survive for one month on just $1,000, making decisions about housing, food, health care, transportation, and more. At each step, you are confronted with real-life-style dilemmas such as paying rent or filling prescriptions, keeping the lights on or repairing your car. This interactive experience helps you see how quickly a tight budget can unravel, and how small shocks or trade-offs compound over time.
When using this game in the classroom, here are some key concepts to unpack and discuss with your students.
Scarcity, trade-offs, and opportunity cost
- Every choice in the game forces you to weigh limited resources against competing needs.
- It makes concrete the idea that choosing one thing (e.g. paying for childcare) means giving up another (e.g. better housing).
Marginal decisions and constraints
- The game simulates decision-making at the margin: “Do I spend this extra few dollars to fix the car now or risk breakdown later?”
- It shows how constraints (income, debt, emergencies) restrict the feasible set of choices.
Risk, shock, and uncertainty
- Unexpected events pop up (medical emergencies, car repairs, job changes). Students see how “bad luck” interacts with tight budgets.
- It highlights how a single shock can cascade if there’s no buffer.
The role of social safety nets, external help, and structural factors
- Some options simulate asking for help or accessing support (or choosing between forms of insurance).
- It pushes students to think about what external systems or policies might shift outcomes.
Path dependence & compounding effects
- Early choices affect later options: skipping a bill might avoid a short-term cost but incur penalties later.
- Students see how a downward spiral can occur when negative consequences accumulate.
Empathy and perspective
- Beyond technical economic lessons, playing SPENT can foster empathy by putting students “in the shoes” of someone living under severe constraints.
- Research using SPENT found it can shift students’ attitudes toward poverty by making abstract struggles more tangible.
