Financial Literacy: Financial Trade-offs

Financial Literacy: Financial Trade-offs

Here’s a quick and simple way to include some easy financial literacy learning into your middle, high school, or special education class.

These 8 prompts describe realistic financial scenarios about work, housing expenses, post-secondary education, cars, retirement planning, and wedding costs. Use them as debate topics, research prompts, or a simple whole class discussion (ideal for those extra few minutes you often end up with before the end of class).
Only simple math skills and basic financial vocabulary are needed to understand these topics.

How to Use: Start by explaining the basic premise to your students:

• Often people can feel stuck in their life due to a financial issue.

• However, by making a few financial trade-offs, there is usually a different way to deal with issues.

• Here are eight real life scenarios that many people deal with. Discuss them with your peers, have a debate, make a list of pros and cons!

• Realize that you always have more options if you can think critically and creatively.

Main Goal:
The main goal of these prompts is to drive home the importance of understanding trade-offs in goal setting and financial planning.

Each topic presents itself as a relatable real-life scenario offering two distinctive choices involving critical thinking and decision-making. There is no "right" answer: just the right answer for your situation.

Grades to Use With:

These prompts could work in a middle or high school math class, a personal planning or career and education class, or a high school special education classroom. They could even be used in adult education scenarios.

What's Included:

A total of 10 pages in PDF:

Title Page, Instruction Page and 8 trade-off situations

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