Grade 9 · secular
This is a course about money decisions, not money facts. Your child will build one imaginary (or real, your call) household budget in week one and then keep adding to that same household all semester — a paycheck, then a budget, then savings that grow over time, then a credit card and some insurance, and finally a full plan where all of it has to work together. By the end they should be able to look at a job offer, a savings goal, a credit card statement, or an insurance decision and actually reason through it instead of guessing. The app grades the calculations automatically. Your job is mostly reading what they write and asking "but why" — that's where the real learning shows up or doesn't.
The whole year, in plain English. Tap any unit to see every skill inside, nothing is hidden.
This is where your child learns that the number on a job offer is never the number that shows up in the bank account. They'll learn to read a pay stub, understand what FICA and tax withholding actually are, and see how getting paid weekly versus monthly changes when money arrives without changing how much there is. It ends with comparing two real-looking job offers and writing a memo defending one.
Given a pay stub or pay statement, identify and label gross pay, each named deduction, and net pay.
Explain, in the student's own words, why gross pay and net pay differ, naming FICA and federal/state withholding as the specific causes.
Calculate net pay from gross pay given a stated hourly wage, hours worked, and a simplified withholding rate table.
Compare two income structures (hourly, salary, commission/tips) by calculating expected net income for each under a given scenario, and classify which structure carries more month-to-month income variability.
Explain how pay frequency (weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly, monthly) changes the timing of cash available to a household without changing the total annual net income.
Given two complete job offers (pay structure, pay frequency, gross pay figures), calculate net pay under each and determine which offer yields more net income annually.
Apply the concept of opportunity cost to a job-offer decision by identifying what is given up (money, time, flexibility, benefits) when one offer is chosen over another.
Given an unfamiliar life circumstance not discussed in class (e.g., a student who needs predictable income to qualify for an apartment lease, or one who travels for two months a year), determine and justify which of two job offers better fits that circumstance.
Write a comparison memo that states which job offer is better for a given household and identifies at least one condition under which the other offer would be the better choice.
Critique a claim such as 'the job with the higher salary is always the better offer' using evidence from calculated net pay and circumstance-fit.
This is the unit where money starts behaving over time instead of just sitting in a budget. The big idea is that compound growth is growth building on top of previous growth — it looks slow for a long time and then looks fast, and time turns out to matter more than most people expect. It uses your child's own savings number from the budgeting unit as a real input to a projection to age 65.
Given the household's monthly net income figure carried over from Unit 1, classify a list of 15 sample household expenses as fixed or variable.
Justify, with reference to the household's actual circumstances, why a specific expense (e.g., a gym membership, a smartphone plan) could reasonably be classified as either a need or a want, taking a defensible position in writing.
Apply the 50/30/20 heuristic to allocate the case household's net income across needs, wants, and savings/debt categories, producing dollar amounts for each band.
Critique the 50/30/20 heuristic's fit to a household whose fixed expenses (e.g., rent in a high cost-of-living area, or a medical condition's recurring costs) exceed 50% of net income, explaining specifically where and why the heuristic breaks down.
Explain why an emergency fund's target size is conventionally expressed in months of essential expenses rather than as a fixed dollar amount, using the concept of liquidity.
Given a month of the case household's actual spending records, calculate the variance between planned and actual amounts in each budget category and identify which variances signal a planning problem versus a one-time event.
Given an unplanned $600 expense scenario, determine whether the case household's completed budget (including emergency fund) can absorb the shock and, if not, generate a specific reallocation across categories that would let it, with numbers.
Compare the household's budget under a 50/30/20 allocation to an alternative allocation the student proposes for a stated non-numeric priority (e.g., prioritizing debt payoff speed over discretionary spending), identifying what the numbers alone cannot decide.
This unit takes the compounding math from Unit 3 and runs it in reverse: instead of interest growing your money, APR grows what you owe. Your child will calculate what a credit card actually costs under minimum payments versus paying it off faster, learn what actions raise or lower a credit score, and then shift into insurance — premiums, deductibles, policy limits, and why insurance can make sense even though most people who buy it never collect.
Given a principal, rate, and time period, the student distinguishes whether a scenario describes simple or compound interest based on how the description states interest is calculated, and identifies which one is being used.
The student calculates the ending balance of an account after a stated number of years under simple interest and under compound interest for the same principal and rate, executing the correct formula for each.
The student explains why compound interest produces an accelerating (not constant) dollar increase per period, using the mechanism that each period's interest is calculated on a base that includes all prior interest.
The student estimates the number of years required for an investment to double at a given interest rate using the Rule of 72, and identifies at what range of interest rates the estimate diverges most from the exact calculation.
Given two savers who differ in start age and monthly contribution amount, the student predicts which will have more money at age 65 before calculating, then compares the predicted and calculated outcomes to identify which variable (time or amount) had the larger effect and why.
The student applies the time-versus-amount reasoning developed for compound savings growth to a structurally identical but unlabeled scenario — paying off debt earlier versus later with different payment amounts — without being told the two scenarios share a structure.
Given two investment return sequences with identical arithmetic average returns but different volatility (order and size of gains/losses), the student determines that the ending balances differ and locates the specific step in each calculation where the difference originates.
The student classifies a description of an investment approach (e.g., 'all savings in one company's stock' vs. 'savings spread across a stock index fund, a bond fund, and a savings account') as diversified or not diversified, and justifies the classification by naming what would have to happen for each approach to lose significant value.
Using the student's own Unit 2 budget savings-line figure as the monthly contribution, the student generates a compound-growth projection to age 65 and evaluates whether the current savings rate is consistent with a stated future goal, proposing one specific change to either the rate or the start-now decision.
Given a description of a totally unfamiliar 'growth' context that shares no vocabulary with money at all — for example, a rumor spreading through a school where the number of new people who hear it each day depends on how many already know it, or a population of bacteria doubling on a fixed schedule — the student determines whether the growth pattern described behaves like simple or like compound interest, and identifies the specific feature of the description (a rate applied to a fixed base vs. a rate applied to an already-grown base) that reveals which one it is, with no dollar figures, no interest vocabulary, and no cue that the question relates to this unit's content at all.
This is the wrap-up unit, and it doesn't teach any new math. Your child has to combine everything — income, budgeting, growth, credit, and insurance — into one household plan, and the real challenge is realizing the five pieces affect each other. Change the budget and the emergency fund target changes. Pay off debt faster and there's less to invest. The order you fund things in is a judgment call your child has to defend, not a formula to look up.
Calculate total interest paid on a credit card balance under a fixed minimum-payment schedule using the given APR.
Calculate total cost and payoff time for the same balance under an accelerated fixed-payment plan and compare it to the minimum-payment total.
Explain why paying only the minimum on a revolving balance extends total cost disproportionately, in terms of compounding acting on a shrinking-slowly principal.
Classify a set of described borrower behaviors (e.g., missed payment, high utilization, long account history, new credit inquiry) as raising, lowering, or having little effect on a credit score.
Infer how a given credit score range would change the APR a hypothetical borrower is offered, using a provided lender rate table.
Differentiate secured debt from unsecured debt using the presence or absence of collateral, applied to unfamiliar loan examples.
Explain, using risk-pooling logic, why a purchase of insurance can be individually rational for a policyholder even though most policyholders never collect on their policy.
Given a household risk scenario not used in instruction, decide which insurance types to carry and which to decline, justifying each decision by weighing premium, deductible, policy limit, and the household's ability to self-insure.
Critique a peer or sample argument that recommends buying insurance based solely on 'what if something happens' reasoning, identifying where risk-pooling logic is missing.
Given a list of a household's assets and liabilities from the running case, calculate net worth and state whether it is positive or negative.
Explain why a household's emergency-fund target depends on the liquidity and variability of its expenses, using the fixed/variable expense distinction from Unit 2.
Compare two proposed funding orders (emergency fund first vs. extra debt payoff first) for the same household and identify what each order gives up.
Given a household's income, existing debt APRs, and lack of an emergency fund, generate and justify a funding order for a monthly surplus that the student has not seen modeled.
Given a household plan where one budget category is changed, trace and revise the resulting changes to at least two other sections (e.g., emergency fund target, debt payoff timeline).
Write a justification for the funding order chosen in the capstone plan that explicitly states what would change in the plan if the order were reversed.
Distinguish a household plan that treats its five parts as interacting from one that treats them as five independent answers, using specific evidence from a sample plan.
Given a household plan for a family with a different income and debt profile than the student's own running case, evaluate whether the standard funding order (emergency fund, high-interest debt, investing/retirement, insurance) still applies and argue for a modification if not.
Recall the definition of net worth, emergency fund, high-interest debt, and risk pooling without a word bank, in the context of the delayed cumulative check.
Given a novel household scenario not seen during the unit, generate a funding order and identify one cross-section dependency, at least one week after the capstone was submitted.
From the parent guide
This is a course about money decisions, not money facts. Your child will build one imaginary (or real, your call) household budget in week one and then keep adding to that same household all semester — a paycheck, then a budget, then savings that grow over time, then a credit card and some insurance, and finally a full plan where all of it has to work together. By the end they should be able to look at a job offer, a savings goal, a credit card statement, or an insurance decision and actually reason through it instead of guessing. The app grades the calculations automatically. Your job is mostly reading what they write and asking "but why" — that's where the real learning shows up or doesn't.
Unit 1 · what to expect
This is where your child learns that the number on a job offer is never the number that shows up in the bank account. They'll learn to read a pay stub, understand what FICA and tax withholding actually are, and see how getting paid weekly versus monthly changes when money arrives without changing how much there is. It ends with comparing two real-looking job offers and writing a memo defending one.
The full guide covers all 4 units: where kids get stuck, what to say, and how to tell it's working. Included with the course.
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