Financing the Future is a six-week financial literacy program designed for students in grades 6–8. Through interactive lessons, real-life examples, team challenges, and hands-on activities, students learn how to make smart decisions about money and build financial skills they can use in everyday life.
Each week focuses on an important area of financial literacy:
- Week 1: Smart Saving
Students learn why saving matters, how to set savings goals, and how to create a realistic savings plan.
- Week 2: Smart Budgeting
Students learn how to create a budget, understand income and expenses, and plan where their money goes before they spend it.
- Week 3: Smart Spending
Students explore needs vs. wants, comparison shopping, unit prices, sales tax, impulse buying, marketing, subscriptions, and the true cost of purchases.
- Week 4: Smart Investing
Students are introduced to investing, compound interest, risk and return, diversification, stocks, bonds, and index funds through activities using pretend money.
- Week 5: Smart Economics
Students learn how supply and demand affect prices, why money exists, how trade and barter work, and how inflation affects the value of money.
- Week 6: Smart Giving
Students explore taxes, charitable giving, volunteering, causes, and impact. They finish by bringing what they learned throughout the program together into their own Money Plan.