Free classroom-ready resource

Free high school personal finance curriculum

Help teenagers build money skills they can use for life with 45 practical lessons, a complete teacher guide, and a printable student workbook.

Students practice realistic financial decisions and see how choices made today can affect their future. No signup is required. Download both PDFs, print the pages you need, and adapt the pacing for a semester course, shorter unit, homeschool program, or youth financial-literacy workshop.

What the course includes

Relevant lessons—not abstract financial theory

Students practice making and tracking a budget, reading a paycheck, preparing for taxes, building emergency savings, understanding inflation, comparing debt, building credit, and using borrowing carefully for goals such as a home or small business.

45 lessons providing approximately 57–60 hours of instruction
Realistic teen income, expenses, budgets, and financial tradeoffs
Saving, compound growth, long-term investing, inflation, and taxes
Credit reports, credit scores, interest rates, loans, and debt traps
Scams, identity theft, high-pressure sales, and get-rich-quick claims
An eight-week pretend $10,000 investment portfolio—no real money used
Clear warnings about options, margin, short selling, leverage, and concentrated bets
Career, college, insurance, housing, business borrowing, and charitable-giving activities
A final personal financial plan and growth reflection

Designed for safe classroom use: Students should not share account numbers, Social Security numbers, passwords, exact family income, or other sensitive personal information. Scores and reflections should remain private and should not be graded based on a student’s financial circumstances.

How to use it

A simple five-step course flow

Begin with the Financial Health Checkup.Have students take the free checkup privately and record only their own learning goals—not sensitive financial details.
Teach the units in order or select the lessons you need.The sequence moves from goals and cash flow through banking, saving, inflation, taxes, credit, debt, investing, protection, careers, housing, business, scams, and planning.
Use the workbook for practice.Students complete realistic budgets, comparisons, reflection prompts, and decision scenarios as each topic is taught.
Run the pretend investing project for at least eight weeks.Students create a diversified fictional portfolio, track performance, compare it with a benchmark, and reflect on risk. No student needs to invest real money.
Finish with the capstone and repeat the checkup.Students build a financial plan, retake the Financial Health Checkup, and compare what they understand and would do differently.

Free PDF downloads

Download the complete course

For the best experience, educators should download both files. You may print or share them for educational use. The materials provide general education and are not individualized financial, legal, tax, credit, insurance, or investment advice.

For instructors

Teacher Guide

Course overview, California topic alignment, 45 lesson plans, learning targets, classroom activities, assessment evidence, numerical examples, teacher keys, investing-project guidance, scam framework, and capstone instructions.

25 pages • PDF • approximately 536 KBDownload Teacher Guide

For students

Student Workbook

Printable worksheets for goals, paychecks, budgets, transaction tracking, banking, emergency funds, inflation, taxes, credit, debt, investing, insurance, education, housing, business, scams, identity theft, and the final financial plan.

30 pages • PDF • approximately 387 KBDownload Student Workbook

Important educator note

California course alignment

The teacher guide maps the lessons to California’s required personal-finance topic areas and is designed to support a semester-length high school course. Schools and districts should complete their own curriculum review, approval, accessibility, instructional-material, and local graduation-requirement processes before adopting it as an official course.

Financial laws, tax rules, benefit limits, rates, and product terms change. Educators should verify time-sensitive figures with current official sources before teaching them.