See our introduction webinar to walk through every aspect of creating your class stock, adding assignments, viewing reports, and much more.
Also check our webinar in managing your class Budget Game, including how the game works, class set-up, and teacher reports.
Starting in the 2026–2027 school year, Ontario students must achieve a minimum score of 70% on a financial literacy assessment as part of the requirements for earning their Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD). The assessment is completed during the compulsory Grade 10 Career Studies course (GLC2O).
For teachers, the challenge goes beyond preparing students to pass a test. It’s about helping young people understand how to earn, save, spend, and borrow money responsibly—and giving them opportunities to practise making financial decisions before they’re responsible for managing their own finances.
This guide explains what Ontario’s new financial literacy graduation requirement involves, the concepts students are expected to understand, and practical ways educators can prepare their classrooms.
Ontario’s requirement is designed to ensure students leave high school with foundational money management knowledge. Developed by TVO, the financial literacy learning modules and assessment questions cover concepts introduced throughout Grades 1–9, including saving, budgeting, credit, debt, and consumer awareness.
The assessment is integrated into Career Studies rather than requiring students to complete an additional financial literacy course.
Here are the key details teachers should know:
| Requirement | Details |
|---|---|
| Implementation | 2026–2027 school year |
| Eligible Students | Students who entered Grade 9 in 2025–2026 or later |
| Course | Grade 10 Career Studies (GLC2O) |
| Minimum Passing Grade | 70% |
| Assessment Provider | TVO |
| Attempts | Two during the Career Studies course |
| Course Grade Weighting | 5% of the final Career Studies mark |
Once a student successfully completes the requirement, it is recorded on their Ontario Student Transcript.
The requirement generally applies to students who entered Grade 9 in September 2025 or later. Most students in this group will complete the assessment during Grade 10 Career Studies, beginning in the 2026–2027 school year.
Some exceptions apply. For example, students who completed Career Studies before September 2026 are not required to complete the new assessment. There are also specific exemptions related to certain mathematics pathways and students transferring into Ontario schools.
Teachers and school administrators should consult the Ontario Ministry of Education’s official financial literacy guidance for current eligibility rules and exemptions.
Ontario’s financial literacy assessment evaluates students’ understanding of money management concepts they will encounter throughout their lives.
According to TVO Learn’s Financial Literacy Graduation Requirement resources, the assessment covers budgeting, interest rates, earning and saving, taxes, credit and debt, consumer awareness, and financial fraud.
These topics are closely connected. Understanding how much money is available to spend, for example, requires students to recognize the difference between gross and net income. Making responsible borrowing decisions requires an understanding of interest, repayment obligations, and the impact of debt on a budget.
Budgeting and managing expenses involves understanding how to allocate limited income among essential expenses, discretionary spending, and savings. Students should recognize why a spending plan matters and how changing circumstances can affect financial priorities.
Earning and saving money introduces the relationship between employment income, spending decisions, and financial goals. Students should understand why setting money aside regularly can help them prepare for both expected expenses and unexpected financial challenges.
Interest rates affect savings and borrowing in different ways. Interest earned on savings can help money grow over time, while interest charged on debt increases the total cost of borrowing. Understanding this distinction is fundamental to evaluating financial products.
Taxes help students understand why their take-home pay may be lower than their gross earnings and how taxation affects their personal finances.
Credit and debt introduce the responsibilities that come with borrowing money. Students should recognize that access to credit creates financial obligations and that interest rates, repayment schedules, and borrowing costs matter.
Consumer awareness involves making informed purchasing decisions, comparing options, and recognizing the difference between needs and wants.
Financial fraud and scams address the importance of protecting personal information and recognizing situations that could put someone’s money or financial identity at risk.
Together, these topics provide a practical foundation for financial independence.
One of the most valuable things students can learn about personal finance is that building financial security isn’t necessarily about how much money they earn. It’s about the decisions they make with the money they have.
Consider a student who has just started earning income from a part-time job. They could spend everything they earn, or they could begin developing a habit that will serve them for years to come: Pay Yourself First.
This simple principle encourages students to prioritize saving before spending on non-essential purchases.
Teachers can introduce the 50/30/20 budgeting rule, which divides after-tax income into three categories: 50% for needs, 30% for wants, and 20% for savings goals.
Students can practise allocating their income and then explore what happens when their expenses exceed their budget.
But a budget is only part of the picture. Students should also understand why saving early matters.
Through lessons on the power of compound interest, students discover how money can grow when interest or investment returns are reinvested over time. Comparing someone who starts investing at age 18 with someone who waits until age 30 helps illustrate how time can influence long-term financial outcomes, even when the later investor contributes more each month. Investment returns are not guaranteed, but the example reinforces the potential advantage of starting early.
Another essential skill is understanding the true cost of borrowing. A student might be able to afford the monthly payment on a car loan, but have they considered the interest they’ll pay over the life of the loan, along with insurance, maintenance, and other ownership costs? Similarly, understanding how credit cards work helps students recognize why carrying a balance and making only minimum payments can make purchases much more expensive.
Students also benefit from learning how to protect themselves financially. Building an emergency fund, understanding insurance, recognizing scams, and managing debt responsibly all contribute to their ability to handle unexpected challenges.
These concepts are most meaningful when students have opportunities to put them into practice. Through financial literacy lessons and interactive simulations, teachers can help students experience the consequences of their choices, develop healthy financial habits, and build the confidence to make informed decisions about money.
The goal isn’t simply to prepare students to answer questions on an assessment. It’s to help them recognize the financial decisions they’ll face and give them the knowledge to approach those decisions with confidence.
Ontario’s Grade 10 Career Studies course (GLC2O) already includes important connections between career planning and financial responsibility. Through Strand C2: Budgeting and Financial Management, students explore how financial decisions affect their education, career pathways, and future goals.
The new financial literacy graduation requirement complements this curriculum by assessing foundational money management concepts introduced in earlier grades. While the TVO assessment is a separate requirement, Career Studies provides an opportunity to reinforce those concepts through practical financial activities.
To help teachers connect these learning objectives, PersonalFinanceLab has mapped relevant lessons and interactive simulations to Ontario’s GLC2O curriculum expectations.
The most effective financial literacy lessons connect a financial concept to a decision students can recognize.
For example, when introducing saving, students can explore the difference between putting money aside for a short-term purchase and building an emergency fund to cover unexpected expenses. This helps them understand that saving is not simply about accumulating money; it’s about creating financial flexibility.
When learning about interest, students should see both sides of the equation. Compound interest can help savings and investments grow, but high-interest debt can also become increasingly expensive when balances are left unpaid.
And when discussing credit, students can compare two approaches: someone who pays their credit card balance in full each month and someone who regularly carries a balance, incurs interest charges, and struggles to keep up with payments.
These comparisons give financial concepts context and encourage students to think about the long-term effects of their choices.
Teachers can then reinforce the principles through short activities, calculations, and classroom discussions before asking students to apply what they’ve learned independently.
What does it really take to manage your money month after month? The PersonalFinanceLab Budget Game gives students a chance to find out by stepping into a simulated financial life.
Students take on the role of a college student working part-time or a young adult working full-time. Over a series of simulated months, they earn paycheques, manage household expenses, pay bills, use credit, and work toward financial goals.
But the experience goes well beyond balancing a spreadsheet.
Students choose where to live, how much to spend on groceries, and which phone and internet plans they can afford. They decide whether to pick up extra shifts at work, study to improve their future earning potential, take care of household responsibilities, or spend time socializing with friends.
Along the way, unexpected situations challenge their plans. A decision to adopt a pet, for example, may bring years of companionship but also introduces ongoing expenses and potential veterinary bills. Changing apartments or cancelling a service can mean paying additional fees.
The game moves students through these experiences at an accelerated pace, allowing them to see how decisions made today can affect their financial position months later.
And because success isn’t measured by savings alone, students must also consider their quality of life. Choosing the cheapest option isn’t always the best strategy. The challenge is finding a sustainable balance between financial responsibility and enjoying life.
At the end of each simulated month, students receive feedback on their savings goals, bill payments, credit management, and overall progress. They can use those insights to adjust their approach as they move through the game.
For teachers, it’s an opportunity to move beyond explaining financial concepts and let students discover how managing money actually works through experience.
The Budget Game also incorporates short challenges that turn everyday financial decisions into opportunities to practise useful skills.
In a grocery shopping challenge, students compare products by price, quantity, and quality to identify the best value. They quickly discover that the lowest price doesn’t necessarily mean the best deal.
Other activities challenge students to earn additional income through a simulated part-time job or plan a weekend within their available time and money.
These experiences help connect financial knowledge to familiar decisions. Students aren’t just learning what a budget is; they’re practising how to shop wisely, manage competing priorities, and make the most of limited resources.
Short financial lessons are also integrated into the game, introducing concepts students can immediately apply to improve their financial decisions.
This combination of instruction, practice, and feedback helps students see financial literacy as a practical skill rather than an isolated classroom subject.
Knowing where students are starting, identifying gaps in their understanding, and measuring their progress are all important parts of preparing for Ontario’s financial literacy graduation requirement.
PersonalFinanceLab incorporates several forms of assessment throughout the learning experience, giving teachers opportunities to evaluate students’ knowledge without having to create additional tests or quizzes.
Teachers can begin with our 15-question Pre-Test, which establishes a baseline of students’ understanding of credit, investing, saving, and income. At the end of the learning experience, students complete a Post-Test using the same questions, allowing teachers to measure how their financial knowledge has improved.
Our 2025 Pre/Post Test results demonstrate the value of this approach. Across participating students who completed both assessments, average scores increased from 42% to 68% in credit, 43% to 69% in investing, and 42% to 55% in saving and income.
Assessment is also woven directly into the Budget Game. As students move through their simulated financial lives, short pop-up lessons introduce important financial concepts that they can apply to their decisions in the game. Students can reinforce their understanding through the Wealth Whiz Quiz, an interactive, game show-style challenge featuring 10 randomly selected financial literacy questions. They receive immediate feedback on their answers and earn game points based on their performance, making knowledge checks part of the experience.
Beyond the simulations, every lesson in our Learn Center concludes with a self-grading pop quiz. These quizzes help reinforce key concepts and give students another opportunity to demonstrate what they’ve learned.
Together, these assessments allow teachers to establish a starting point, reinforce understanding throughout instruction, and evaluate progress over time.
While PersonalFinanceLab’s assessments do not replace Ontario’s official TVO financial literacy graduation assessment, they provide valuable opportunities to identify knowledge gaps, monitor learning, and help students build confidence before completing the provincial requirement.
Bringing financial literacy into the classroom doesn’t have to mean developing an entirely new collection of lessons and assessments.
PersonalFinanceLab provides Canadian-focused financial literacy lessons, interactive simulations, and teaching resources that can be incorporated into existing Career Studies instruction.
Teachers can customize the Budget Game to suit their instructional goals, including adjusting wages, living expenses, starting balances, and the length of the simulation. Additional scenarios involving taxes, insurance, and how to build a virtual stock portfolio can reinforce specific classroom topics.
Our learning library complements these experiences with lessons on Canadian banking, saving, financial resilience, consumer protection, and planning for postsecondary education. For classes exploring investing, the Stock Game lets students manage a virtual portfolio without risking real money.
With ready-to-use lessons, interactive experiences, and integrated assessment tools, teachers can select activities that suit their students and available classroom time.
We’ve also mapped relevant PersonalFinanceLab activities to Ontario’s GLC2O Career Studies expectations, making it easier to identify curriculum-aligned resources.
Yes. Beginning in the 2026–2027 school year, students who entered Grade 9 in 2025–2026 or later generally must complete Ontario’s financial literacy graduation requirement to earn an Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD).
Students complete the requirement as part of their compulsory Grade 10 Career Studies course. Certain exemptions apply, so schools should consult the Ministry of Education’s official guidance.
Students must achieve a minimum score of 70% on the official financial literacy modules to meet the graduation requirement.
They have two attempts during their Grade 10 Career Studies course. The highest attempt mark counts toward 5% of their final course grade.
Students who do not meet the requirement during the course have access to alternative completion options and additional support.
No separate financial literacy course is required specifically to fulfill the new graduation requirement.
Students complete the mandatory financial literacy modules and assessment questions within their existing Grade 10 Career Studies course (GLC2O).
Financial literacy is also taught in earlier grades, including Ontario’s elementary and Grade 9 mathematics curricula. The graduation requirement assesses concepts introduced during those earlier years.
Students who do not achieve 70% on their first attempt have another opportunity to complete the requirement during Career Studies.
Before the second attempt, students can review additional learning resources and receive support from their school.
If they are unsuccessful after both in-course attempts, schools must provide alternative ways to meet the graduation requirement. These can include further supervised attempts, additional instructional support, or TVO-developed learning activities that serve as an equivalent pathway.
Students should work with their school to determine the appropriate next steps.
Teachers should begin with TVO Learn’s official financial literacy resources, which provide information and supporting materials for the provincial requirement.
For additional classroom instruction, PersonalFinanceLab offers Canadian financial literacy lessons, budgeting simulations, and student activities that reinforce foundational money management skills.
Teachers can review the Ontario GLC2O curriculum alignment to identify lessons and activities that complement their Career Studies instruction.
Ontario’s financial literacy graduation requirement establishes an important expectation: students should leave high school with a basic understanding of how to manage their money.
But passing an assessment is only one part of becoming financially capable.
When students have opportunities to create budgets, compare financial options, practise saving, and learn from simulated decisions, financial literacy becomes more than a collection of concepts to remember. It becomes a set of skills they can begin using in their everyday lives.
By combining clear instruction with meaningful practice, Ontario teachers can help students prepare for the graduation requirement while building financial confidence that extends well beyond the classroom.
Discover how PersonalFinanceLab supports Ontario’s Grade 10 Career Studies curriculum through aligned lessons, interactive financial simulations, and practical teaching resources.
We are gearing up for the school year! Join the PersonalFinanceLab Team for our line-up of webinars to help make the most of out games, simulations, and curriculum in your classroom!
This webinar was a brief introduction to PersonalFinanceLab for first-time teachers, presented by Eric Poff (our account manager covering the West Coast and South).
This webinar gave an overview of our improved teacher onboarding, 2026 curriculum updates, and an invitation to our new Financial Life Simulation early test version.
This webinar introduced both of our simulations to new teachers, with a greater emphasis on teacher resources, lesson plans, and tips for setting your class up for success.
This webinar covered the best ways to use a stock game in your class, aimed at teachers new to teaching investing topics or are using a stock game for the first time.
We covered “best practice” rules to maximize student engagement, how to use our built-in lessons to help students understand investing concepts (even if you personally are not an investor), and tried-and-true grading rubrics to evaluate students in a stock game project.
This is a deep-dive presentation into the “how” and “why” to build effective financial educational resources. The PersonalFinanceLab Director of Product Development gives an inside look into what makes financial lessons “stick” with students, and contrast with easy-to-miss pitfalls that can cause classes and materials fall on deaf ears of students.
If you have already set up and run successful stock games in your classes before, this webinar is for you! We covered advanced class set-up strategies, including weekly deposits (to mimic saving in a retirement account), sequential unlocks, Sharpe Ratio rankings, collaborative team projects and more!
Our new lesson drop for Fall 2026 is here! We have some brand-new lessons, over a hundred updates across our lesson library, and new standards alignments ready for teachers!
We are excited to announce our suite of new lessons ready for this Fall!
Healthcare is expensive – very expensive. Struggling with healthcare costs is one of the biggest sources of financial, and mental, stress for tens of millions of people every year. This lesson covers programs that help make that cost a bit more affordable.
See what exactly a 401(k) plan can get you, and how it figures into your financial planning for retirement.
The IRA is a fundamental building block of retirement planning. See how they work and learn how to get started!
Understand OSHA protections, federal labor laws, and union basics so you can support a healthy workplace.
How to align your lifestyle with what you can afford and respond to crises without panic borrowing.
How to build a three-to-five-year career plan and test paths before you commit.
Big upgrade for our Canadian schools as well – even more lessons have been given Canadian-specific versions!
When navigating our Personal Finance assignments, teachers can now also see icons for regional-specific lessons. A small American Flag indicates that this lesson is US-centric, while a small maple leaf indicates its Canadian counterparts.
Every Canadian lesson has a US – centric counterpart. If a teacher assigns both the US and Canadian version of any of these lessons, students will get credit for both by completing either. For example, completing the “How to file your taxes” lesson in either the US or Canadian version will count for credit across both versions.
The current list of Canada-specific lessons is:
We have published a massive update to our Standards Alignments as well – accompanying hundreds of smaller updates across our curriculum library to address new or expanded topics!
While we have had updates across literally dozens of sets of standards, some of the biggest and best additions we’ve added include our Financial Mathematics Standards Alignment, Louisiana Financial Literacy Course Alignment, and our upcoming alignment to the course guidelines for AP Business with Personal Finance (with curriculum updates completed, standards alignment page still in progress).
We also have made it easier than ever to create pre-packaged, standards-aligned assignments for your class!
On our Assignments Creation page teachers can now find our “Suggested Assignments” button:
Clicking this will open more options, allowing teachers to select their state, the subject they teach, and the unit they want to align to. Our system will then automatically select all lessons in our curriculum library that align with what they are trying to teach – perfectly aligned to your state standards!
No more digging, no more fussing – everything is ready to go with just a few clicks!
The strongest benefit of the PersonalFinanceLab Curriculum is that it is web-based and always evolving! This Fall we are focusing on expanding our coverage of Career Readiness! This will be expanded into its own dedicated “Unit” of lessons (instead of lessons distributed through our existing units), and dividing up some of our existing lessons to give a better focus on specific Career Readiness take-aways.
As always, the biggest driver of our curriculum development is teacher feedback – so be sure to reach out with any comments!
Happy Learning!
-The PFinLab Team
Getting to know PersonalFinanceLab just got a whole lot easier!
For Fall 2026, we are proud to announce our new Teacher Onboarding Flow – quick help and mini-guides to help teachers get their classes off on the right foot, without hours of demos or reading through complicated teacher guides.
Our previous teacher onboarding flow dropped teachers straight into Class Creation the first time they logged in, with the option for “Manual” or “Express” set-up.
The “Express” setup can help get your classes up and running quickly with our recommended settings, but teachers unfamiliar with PersonalFinanceLab might still be a bit lost in what exactly they set up.
With our new onboarding system, teachers instead start already registered into a “Demo Session” – and are taken to the Student Dashboard the first time they log in.
This new flow has 3 major advantages over the previous system:
You are taken straight to the student dashboard, and can immediately see an Assignment, your demo Stock Game, and your demo Budget Game waiting for you – exactly as your students will the first time they log in. This gives you more insight into what their experience will be, and make you better able to point them in the right direction if they are immediately lost.
This also means you have the opportunity to play the games before setting up your own class – giving you a much clearer idea of what the various settings you can select when setting up your class actually “do”.
Previously teachers would frequently set up their own “demo session” to get this experience (which could clutter up their reports later) – the new Onboarding Sandbox keeps your class reports clean while letting you “play around” before setting up your finalized class settings.
Best of all, the Onboarding Session has two custom assignments, set up explicitly for first-time teachers:
This is in place with the lessons and activities from our curriculum library that you would be assigning your students later.
This custom assignment has the “bare bones” information you need to successfully set up your class, while allowing you to dive deeper on any topic for which you need more help.
The information in this short assignment comes from our Teacher Resource Center, which is still available at any time, but this assignment pulls out the “most essential” elements to help you get your classes off to a running start (and points you to deeper resources, if you want to explore).
The “Onboarding Assignment” finishes with a direct task to set up your first class – and supplemental guides with lesson plans, course outlines, and more resources (if you need them), along with a “quick link” to book a meeting with your personal account manager if you have any other questions or need a personalized walkthrough.
We are super excited for this improvement to the new teacher experience!
Happy Learning!
-The PFinLab Team
It is getting to the end of the semester – a lot of your students are about to graduate. You taught everything you could – and leveraged the PersonalFinanceLab Budgeting Game, Investing Game, and Assignments to help hammer those lessons home.
But you still want one last thing to give students as a final take-away – the 10 most important financial topics you want to make sure they remember for the rest of their lives.
This exact desire for a final take-away is why we created our Personal Finance Survival Kit – designed as an 8 print-off (2 pages front-and back, folded into half pages) that students can print off and take home as a reminder of the most important lessons in personal finance.
This is the web version – you can download our print version here, or send the link to your students to print off on their own at home!
For teachers who get our Gift Boxes each semester, we will also be bundling a few of these print-outs in each box!
Happy Learning!
-PFinLab Team
The results are in! After weeks of budgeting, investing, and real-world financial decision-making, the Spring 2026 Financial Literacy Challenge has officially wrapped up. Students from across North America demonstrated incredible financial knowledge, strategic thinking, and problem-solving skills throughout the competition.
We’re excited to recognize this year’s top performers and celebrate the teachers who continue to inspire the next generation of financially confident students. Congratulations to all of our winners—and to every student who participated and strengthened their financial literacy skills along the way!
From mastering spending decisions to building smart saving habits, this year’s Budget Game winners showcased outstanding financial decision-making skills throughout the challenge. Congratulations to all of our top-performing students for their hard work, strategy, and dedication!
This semester’s Stock Game winners demonstrated impressive investing knowledge, portfolio strategy, and market analysis skills. Competing in a dynamic market environment, these students rose to the top with thoughtful trades and strong long-term thinking. Congratulations to our winning investors!
This spring, more than 1,600 students submitted heartfelt nominations sharing why their teachers deserve recognition for making financial literacy engaging, impactful, and inspiring. We’re proud to celebrate this year’s winning teachers and the incredible difference they’ve made in their classrooms.
Congratulations to:
Jason Ware – Lambert High School, GA
Heather Hastie – Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School, ON
Leesa Hudak – Bow High School
Read what their students had to say here.
Thank you to every student, teacher, and classroom that participated in the Spring 2026 Financial Literacy Challenge. Your enthusiasm, creativity, and dedication to building real-world financial skills made this semester’s competition an incredible success.
Congratulations again to all of our winners, and a special thank you to the educators who continue to empower the next generation with the confidence and knowledge to make smart financial decisions. We can’t wait to see you again for the next Financial Literacy Challenge!
We’re excited to announce the winners of the 2026 PersonalFinanceLab Financial Literacy Challenge Teacher Giveaway!
This year, students from across North America nominated the educators who have made a meaningful impact on their financial literacy journey. We received over 1,600 nominations, each sharing thoughtful stories about teachers who are making a real difference in the classroom
After reviewing all the nominations, we’re thrilled to recognize three outstanding teachers, each of whom will receive a $100 Amazon Gift Card as a small token of our appreciation.
Lambert High School, Georgia
“Mr. Ware was a profoundly deep individual to my Financial Literacy comprehension skills. As a result of Mr. Ware, I was able to expand my borders of knowledge within Microeconomics and Macroeconomics.”
Jason Ware’s impact clearly extends beyond the classroom, helping students build a deeper and more confident understanding of core economic principles.
Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School, Ontario
“I am nominating my teacher because they have gone far beyond simply teaching financial concepts—they have fundamentally changed the way I think about money and decision-making. Before taking their class, financial literacy felt abstract and even intimidating. Budgeting, saving, investing, and credit were just terms I had heard but never fully understood or applied. My teacher made these ideas practical, relevant, and empowering.”
Heather Hastie’s ability to transform financial literacy from intimidating to empowering is exactly what this challenge is all about.
Bow High School
“I am nominating my teacher because she has had a major impact on how I understand financial literacy and how I approach learning in general. She is a tough teacher who sets high expectations, pushing students to think deeper and truly understand the material.
What makes her stand out is how she connects financial literacy to the real world—especially through lessons on the stock market and investing—making everything relevant and engaging. Because of her teaching, I now have a much stronger understanding of investing and financial responsibility.”
Leesa Hudak exemplifies the kind of educator who challenges students while equipping them with lifelong skills. You can read more about her teaching approach in our previous profile here.
We want to extend a sincere thank you to every teacher who was nominated. The passion, dedication, and real-world impact reflected in these submissions made it clear that financial literacy education is thriving in classrooms everywhere.
To all educators using PersonalFinanceLab—thank you for the work you do every day to prepare students for their financial futures. Your influence goes far beyond the curriculum.
Stay tuned for more opportunities, highlights, and educator stories from the PersonalFinanceLab community!
We’re excited to introduce three new additions to our Personal Finance Curriculum Library, focused on topics students will encounter early in their working lives: 401(k) Plans, Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRA), and Paying for Healthcare using FSA, HSA, and HRA.
While these topics may seem like “future” concerns, many of the most important financial decisions students will make happen within their first few years of working. These lessons are designed to help students understand those decisions before they have to make them.
Our 401(k) lesson introduces workplace retirement plans, including employer matching, vesting periods, tax advantages, and automatic contributions. Students see how these plans work in practice and why contributing early can make a major difference over time.
The IRA lesson builds on this by exploring individual retirement savings options. Students learn the differences between Traditional and Roth IRAs, how tax benefits work, and how these accounts fit alongside employer-sponsored plans .
Finally, our healthcare lesson helps students navigate the often confusing world of FSA, HSA, and HRA accounts. It breaks down how each program works and how they can be used to manage healthcare costs more effectively.
Across all three lessons, the focus is on real-world application. Students explore how these programs actually work, what choices they will need to make, and how those choices can impact their long-term financial well-being.
Each lesson also wraps up with a short pop quiz to reinforce key concepts and check for understanding.
We hope these additions help your students build a stronger foundation in managing workplace benefits, planning for the future, and making informed financial decisions.
Happy Learning!
– The PersonalFinanceLab Team
We’re excited to introduce the newest addition to our Personal Finance Curriculum Library: Paying for Healthcare – Using FSA, HSA, and HRA!
Healthcare costs are one of the most common sources of financial stress, yet the tools available to manage those costs are often confusing and overlooked. This lesson helps students make sense of three of the most common programs they may encounter through an employer.
In this lesson, we cover Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA), Health Savings Accounts (HSA), and Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRA), along with how each one works, how they are funded, and how they can be used. Students learn the key differences between these options and how each can help reduce the overall cost of healthcare.
What makes this lesson especially valuable is the focus on real-world decisions. Students explore questions like what happens to unused funds, what carries over from year to year, and how these accounts fit into broader financial planning. These are details that can have a real impact on someone’s finances, but are rarely taught early on.
The lesson wraps up with a short pop quiz to reinforce key concepts and check for understanding.
We hope this lesson helps your students feel more confident navigating healthcare costs and workplace benefits.
Happy Learning!
– The PersonalFinanceLab Team
We’re excited to introduce the newest addition to our Personal Finance Curriculum Library: Understanding Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRA)!
Retirement planning is one of those topics students know is important, but rarely understand in a practical way. This lesson helps connect the dots early by showing how small, consistent savings decisions can grow into something meaningful over time.
In this lesson, we cover key topics like Traditional vs Roth IRAs, tax advantages, contribution limits, early withdrawal rules, and more. Each concept is presented in a way that helps students understand not just how these accounts work, but why they matter.
What makes this lesson especially valuable is the focus on real-world application. Students explore how IRA contributions can reduce taxable income, how different account types affect long-term outcomes, and how IRAs fit alongside other retirement tools like 401(k) plans . These are the kinds of decisions many people do not fully understand until much later, which is exactly why they are important to introduce in the classroom.
The lesson wraps up with a short pop quiz to reinforce key concepts and check for understanding.
We hope this lesson helps your students build a strong foundation in long-term saving and investing.
Happy Learning!
– The PersonalFinanceLab Team
We’re excited to introduce the newest addition to our Personal Finance Curriculum Library: Understanding 401(k) Plans!
Retirement might feel like a distant concept for students, but some of the most important financial decisions they will ever make start within the first few years of working.
In this lesson, we cover key topics like Defined Contribution vs Defined Benefit plans, tax advantages, employer matching, vesting periods, automatic contributions, and more. Each concept is presented in a practical way to help students connect what they learn in class to real decisions they will face early in their careers.
What makes this lesson especially valuable is the focus on how these accounts work in real life. Students explore how contributions are taxed, what happens when you change jobs, and why vesting periods matter. These are details many people do not learn until much later, which is exactly why they are important to introduce in the classroom.
The lesson wraps up with a short pop quiz to reinforce key concepts and check for understanding.
We hope this lesson helps your students build a strong foundation for understanding workplace benefits and long-term financial planning.
Happy Learning!
– The PersonalFinanceLab Team
On March 18th, we hosted our Spring 2026 Financial Literacy Challenge Kickoff Webinar, where we showed how PersonalFinanceLab’s free challenge can help engage students and build real-world financial skills.
In this session, we walk through:
If you are planning to participate this spring, this webinar is a great place to get started.
The results from our pre- and post- tests in 2025 are in – and we could not be more excited!
PersonalFinanceLab has pre- and post- testing integrated in out platform for participating classes. Teachers who agree to the integrated Pre Test will have their students complete our 15-question pre-test launch on their first sign-in.
Then, 2 weeks before their class End Date, students will be prompted to take our post- test. The questions on each test are the same, and are categorized as “Credit”, “Investing”, or “Saving and Income”. This allows us to separately report on outcomes of students depending on whether they participated in the Budgeting Game or Stock Game.
You can see our updated methodology by clicking here.
Because not every student utilizes both our Stock Game and Budgeting Game, and these games are designed to teach different types of financial concepts, we split out our reporting based on if a student completed each game. We also only count results of students who completed BOTH the pre- test and post-test, for a perfect apples-to-apples measurement of improvement.
| Question Category | Pre-Test Score | Post-Test Score | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Credit | 42% | 68% | +62% |
| Investing | 43% | 69% | +60% |
| Savings and Income | 42% | 55% | +31% |
| Question Category | Pre-Test Score | Post-Test Score | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Credit | 42% | 69% | +63% |
| Investing | 43% | 70% | +61% |
| Savings and Income | 42% | 57% | +35% |
| Question Category | Pre-Test Score | Post-Test Score | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Credit | 44% | 71% | +62% |
| Investing | 46% | 72% | +56% |
| Savings and Income | 45% | 55% | +24% |
Since our last reported pre- and post- test results, we modified our mini-lessons in the budgeting game to include a variety of investing topics (especially towards the end of the game). Since this change, students playing the budgeting game have gone from very little observed improvement on understanding investing concepts to almost as much improvement as students who fully participated in the stock game.
We also revamped our “Word of the Day” system that students encounter throughout both games. The previous “Key Terms” widget showed a different financial definition on each page, while our new system consistently shows the same “Word of the Day” all day, with updated definitions and links to lessons covering that concept in more detail. This has helped cross-pollination of students participating only in the stock game to getting much better exposure to general financial literacy concepts – which we are partially attributing to the increase in scores on Credit and Savings/Income topics for students who otherwise would not have had much exposure to those concepts.
If your class is using PersonalFinanceLab and you want to see your students’ results, there is a specific assignment task for “Pre Test” and “Post Test”, as well as a class setting to require students to complete both tests as part of your class (you can find this setting on class set-up, or “Edit My Session” from the admin menu.
We highly encourage teachers to require their students to complete the post test! Frequently teachers will assign only the pre-test to get a benchmark for student understanding at the start of the class, but not the post-test at the end of the class. We greatly appreciate teachers assigning BOTH tests to give us the widest-possible data set to measure the effectiveness of the platform!
We will continue to monitor student results closely, along with student and teacher feedback for our next updates!
We recently hosted a live webinar walking through important updates to our Assignments feature — and how these changes impact your existing classes.
If you’re currently using Assignments (or planning to), this session will help you understand what’s new, what’s improved, and how to make the most of the latest enhancements.
If you weren’t able to attend live — or would like to revisit the walkthrough — you can watch the full recording below:
If you have any questions after watching, feel free to reach out to our team. We’re always happy to help you get the most out of PersonalFinanceLab.
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Hey teachers!
Our feature update list for the Spring semester is shorter than some of our previous releases, but that’s because they are some big ones! Get excited for the biggest update to our Assignments engine we’ve ever seen, and a new AI assistant to help students understand their portfolios in our Stock Game!
Our biggest update is a complete overhaul of our Assignments Engine!
This update includes, but is not limited to:
Our Wealth Wizard is a classroom-safe, AI-powered tool for our stock game, designed to help students pick their first stocks, understand their portfolio, and learn smart questions to ask when building and managing investments.
While these two enhancements are the only big ones for this Spring, as always we have a mountain of small improvements to our lesson library, bug fixes, and small improvements to both student and instructor user experiences in store as well!
Happy Learning!
-The PFinLab Team
Hey teachers!
Our stock game is getting a big upgrade for students looking for help building their portfolio with our new AI companion – the Wealth Wizard!
Not a fan of AI in the classroom? The Wealth Wizard can be toggled on or off in your class settings!
The Wealth Wizard is an AI companion that helps students ask smart questions about how they build an investment portfolio, both in making their first trades and as they manage their portfolio throughout their class.
The Wealth Wizard works by giving students a series of prompts about smart questions to ask about building their portfolio – and uses our integrated AI to answer them.
Note: The Wealth Wizard does not have any open-ended input from students – students are limited to interaction through our pre-defined prompts, based only on their PersonalFinanceLab stock game portfolio.
The Wealth Wizard starts off by asking students how much they want to invest, in how many different industries, which industries they are most interested in, and their risk level (Conservative, Moderate, or Aggressive). It then suggests matching stocks that fit their criteria, pulled mostly from our existing “Suggested Stocks” rotating list. Think of it like a personalized Stock Screener for beginners!
The Wealth Wizard is not limited to just smart suggestions for trading ideas – it can also help students understand and rebalance their portfolio after they have made their first trades.
Some of the prompts available include:
The Wealth Wizard will be made available for classes on PersonalFinanceLab in January, 2026.
No. While the Wealth Wizard is powered by AI, students are not able to directly interact with the AI itself, give any personalized prompts, or make any response to its output based on what prompts they did select.
This helps ensure there is a safety wall between students and the AI, helping to improve student digital literacy while also keeping students exposed to the technologies that exist after graduation.
No. The Wealth Wizard is a configurable setting for your class Stock Game settings (turned off by default). Instructors can enable or disable the Wealth Wizard at any time in their class settings.
No, but based on user feedback, the Wealth Wizard may be made available as part of the budgeting game at a later date. While the Budgeting Game does provide feedback to students based on their actions through the game, this is provided based purely by their actions in a defined feedback system with static output (it is not run through any AI).
We hope you are as excited as we are to bring the latest and greatest digital tools to your classroom!
-The PFinLab Team
Hey teachers!
We are excited to announce the biggest overhaul we’ve ever made to our Assignments engine – just in time for your Spring classes!
“Assignments” refers to the built-in tracking system featured on PersonalFinanceLab. This system allows teachers to assign work for their students to do on the platform – from playing through the Budgeting Game (or making certain types of purchases while they play), to building their portfolio on the Stock Game, or completing lessons and taking quizzes in our curriculum library, and everything in between.
By creating an Assignment, teachers set start dates and due dates, and select which tasks they want their students to complete (be it actions in our Games or lessons and quizzes to complete). Teachers can even stack up assignments by using Prerequisites, or give students Rewards in either game if the assignments are completed on time.
The Assignments system is also used for the backbone of our Badges and Certificates.
We have spent the last several months re-building our assignments engine from the ground up to meet the growing needs of teachers we work with every day.
Besides the back-end improvements in speed of reporting (particularly how fast a student can download their Certificates of Completion after finishing all requirements), there are a number of changes and improvements teachers can find this Spring:
Assignments previously were “locked” to the dates you selected. Adding tasks to an Assignment after students already completed some of the required work could cause desynchronization of reports, or lost quiz progress.
The new Assignments engine separates the reporting from logging. This means you can make any edit to your Assignments at any time, and it will automatically update based on your new settings.
Not only does this make it easier to update your class settings as your classroom needs evolve, but it even allows changing grade requirements after students have already begun (for example, allowing students with particularly low scores to re-take quizzes, without impacting the rest of the class), or even creating an assignment in the past to see which students made certain actions before now.
The new system’s logging and reporting features open a lot of possibilities for dense assignments. This includes a greater number of tasks allowed per assignment (formerly 100 tasks per assignment, now allows EVERY task simultaneously), but also a greater number of assignments per class (formerly capped at 20, now unlimited).
This gives much greater flexibility to non-profit organizations that wish to open up every task to students all in one go due to asynchronous learning, as well as hyper-focused teachers that like to create separate assignments for every class session.
The Assignments Reporting restrictions are also lifted, meaning large classes (150+ students) have access to the same reporting and export capabilities, without manual exports needed through their account managers.
The previous version of our assignments system allowed teachers to grant “Retries” to quizzes that they included as part of their class assignment – but it limited to “None” or “Infinite” (with grades simply based on the last attempt of retries were allowed).
Tasks also needed to be individually toggled to be retried or not, a tedious process for assignments that might have dozens of tasks.
Our latest update instead introduces a new concept – “Allowed Attempts”. With Allowed Attempts, instructors can specify how many attempts are allowed on any given quiz – the system will report the highest grade a student achieved within the allowed number of attempts. “Allowed Attempts” is also set once for your entire assignment – no need to manually set this separately for every single quiz.
If a student continues to re-attempt the quiz, their grade on the Report Card will not update, but teachers can see any additional attempts when inspecting the Student Details.
Previously our assignments system was locked to US Eastern Time – despite other time restrictions being based on the time zone instructors select when creating their session.
This limitation has been removed with the new Assignments engine, ensuring precisely-set start and end dates are always exactly what instructors expect when setting up.
Last, but definitely not least, is our full support for French and Spanish-language classes! Earlier in the Fall 2025 semester we released our translated content for our quizzes and budget game (with the stock game fully translated several years ago), but the assignment admin interface and reporting was still English-Only.
This update brings full translation across every element of the platform!
Our upgraded Assignments system is running in the background now – but not all of the features will be available until late January 2026 (with both the old system and new system running in parallel for testing purposes).
When the update is released, it will be applied retroactively to all existing assignments, with all the new features applied to existing assignments automatically.
Happy Learning!
-The PFinLab Team
fully aligned with TEKS §130.180 and supported by hands-on, project-based activities through PersonalFinanceLab.
This curriculum guides students step-by-step through the real financial decisions they will make as young adults. From budgeting and income to investing, major purchases, and financial protection, each unit builds toward the capstone project: Funding Your Desired Life, where students create a complete personal financial plan using real data and practical math skills.
Here’s what the full course now includes:
Each unit includes lessons, activities, calculators, and project components designed to help students make confident, well-informed financial decisions—now and for the rest of their lives.
Unit 8 of TEKS Financial Mathematics focuses on the protective side of personal finance—teaching students how insurance, emergency planning, and consumer protections help safeguard their financial future. After building their financial “offense” in Units 1–7, this final unit shifts to financial “defense,” ensuring that unexpected events don’t derail their long-term plans.
Students learn the essentials of health, disability, and life insurance, plus how to protect major assets through auto, renter’s, and homeowner’s coverage. The unit also introduces strategies for preventing identity theft, spotting scams, and preparing simple end-of-life documents.
What Students Do in Unit 8:
Unit 8 equips students with the knowledge to protect themselves, their belongings, and the financial plan they’ve worked hard to build.
Unit 7 of TEKS Financial Mathematics helps students understand the financial decisions behind life’s biggest early purchases—buying a car, renting an apartment, and purchasing a home. Students learn how to compare options, calculate total costs, and evaluate long-term trade-offs so they can make informed choices that fit their budget and financial plan.
Through hands-on activities, students research real vehicles and housing options, calculate loan payments, build amortization tables, and perform rent-vs-buy comparisons. This unit brings together budgeting, credit, and mathematical analysis to prepare students for major real-world financial decisions.
What Students Do in Unit 7:
Unit 7 gives students the tools to evaluate major purchases with clarity and confidence, ensuring these big decisions support—not undermine—their long-term financial goals.
Unit 6 of TEKS Financial Mathematics teaches students how credit works, how to borrow responsibly, and how debt affects long-term financial health. Students explore different types of credit—from credit cards to installment loans—and learn the true cost of borrowing by calculating interest, monthly payments, and payoff timelines.
They also examine credit reports and credit scores, learning how financial behavior impacts borrowing opportunities, housing, and even employment. By the end of this unit, students understand how to build, protect, and repair their credit profile.
What Students Do in Unit 6:
Unit 6 equips students with the practical skills to use credit wisely and avoid the financial pitfalls that can come with unmanaged debt.
Unit 5 of TEKS Financial Mathematics introduces students to the world of investing and helps them understand how to grow their wealth beyond traditional savings. Students learn the differences between major asset classes—such as stocks, bonds, and ETFs—and explore how risk, return, and diversification work together in a long-term investment plan.
Through hands-on activities and the Stock Game, students research companies, compare performance, and practice making informed buy, sell, and hold decisions. By the end of the unit, they begin building a diversified portfolio aligned with their financial goals.
What Students Do in Unit 5:
Unit 5 gives students the confidence to make smart, informed investing decisions and understand how long-term investing supports their bigger financial goals.
Unit 4 of TEKS Financial Mathematics teaches students how to turn saving into a long-term habit and understand the math behind building wealth over time. Students explore different types of financial institutions and account options, compare payment methods, and learn how to choose the right tools for everyday banking.
The unit then moves into the core concepts that drive long-term financial growth—compound interest, the Rule of 72, and time value of money. Students begin translating small saving decisions into long-term outcomes, including the foundation of their future retirement planning.
What Students Do in Unit 4:
Unit 4 helps students see that saving isn’t just about setting money aside—it’s about using math strategically to grow wealth over a lifetime.
Unit 3 of TEKS Financial Mathematics gives students a practical understanding of how the U.S. tax system works. They learn how to read common tax forms, calculate taxable income, apply progressive tax brackets, and determine whether a filer owes taxes or is due a refund. This unit takes the mystery out of tax filing by breaking the process into simple, step-by-step calculations.
Students explore filing statuses, deductions, credits, and the difference between marginal and effective tax rates. They also learn how side income, capital gains, and self-employment affect taxes, helping them make informed financial decisions now and in the future.
What Students Do in Unit 3:
Unit 3 empowers students to understand their tax obligations with confidence and prepares them for real-world financial independence.
In Unit 2 of TEKS Financial Mathematics, students learn how income really works—from reading a paycheck to understanding total compensation and how economic factors influence long-term earning potential. This unit builds directly on their lifestyle goals from Unit 1, helping students evaluate whether their chosen career path can support their desired financial plan.
Students explore the differences between gross and net pay, compare W-2 and contractor roles, and analyze the value of employee benefits such as health insurance, retirement contributions, and paid time off. They also begin mapping a long-term income strategy that includes additional income streams and ongoing skill development.
What Students Do in Unit 2:
Unit 2 helps students see income not just as a number on a paycheck, but as a complete picture of financial opportunity, benefits, and career strategy.
TEKS Financial Mathematics is a hands-on, project-based course that teaches students how to apply math to real financial decisions. Unit 1 launches the course’s capstone project, Funding Your Desired Life, where students begin building a personalized financial plan they will update throughout all eight units.
In this first unit, students learn the basics of budgeting, explore career pathways, and calculate the true cost—and return on investment (ROI)—of postsecondary education. Using data from the Budget Game and real job postings, they connect everyday money choices to long-term lifestyle goals.
What Students Do in Unit 1:
Unit 1 gives students a realistic starting point for understanding how their choices today shape the financial future they want tomorrow.
The Financial Literacy Challenge 2025 has officially come to a close—and what an incredible year it has been! Thousands of students from across the country put their financial knowledge to the test.
This challenge continues to be one of our favorite annual initiatives because it highlights exactly why financial education matters: students gain confidence, build life-long skills, and learn to make informed decisions that set them up for future success. This year’s participants raised the bar higher than ever.
Today, we are excited to recognize the students who truly excelled.
The Budget Game tested students’ ability to manage income, handle unexpected expenses, and make wise financial decisions under pressure. These students achieved the highest scores and demonstrated stellar money-management skills. Congratulations to the top 5 students who have each won a $50 Amazon Gift Card.
The Stock Game highlighted students’ understanding of investing, diversification, market trends, and long-term wealth building. These winners earned the highest portfolio values and demonstrated smart, strategic investment choices. Congratulations to the top 5 students who have each won a $50 Amazon Gift Card.
One of the most meaningful parts of this year’s challenge is hearing from students about the teachers who inspired and supported them. The Teacher Nomination Awards honor educators who made a lasting impact—whether through exceptional guidance, enthusiasm for financial education, or dedication to their students’ success.
Every student who took part in the Financial Literacy Challenge gained valuable real-world skills—budgeting, saving, investing, and more—that will last a lifetime. We also extend our deepest appreciation to the educators who bring financial literacy to life in their classrooms. Teachers will be contacted directly if they or their students have won.
Stay tuned for information about the 2026 Spring Financial Literacy Challenge!
Is your financial plan built to withstand a storm?
A strong financial plan needs a great defense. This presentation teaches students how to build a fortress around their finances, covering the three essential layers of protection: a robust emergency fund, the right types of insurance, and a multi-layered strategy for protecting their digital identity from modern scams.
Click Here to download this presentation in Google Drive
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This presentation decodes the “alphabet soup” of retirement savings, making complex topics easy to understand. Students will learn the key differences between employer-sponsored plans like 401(k)s and personal accounts like IRAs, and they’ll master the critical decision between paying taxes now (Roth) or later (Traditional).
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What is the single most powerful force for building wealth?
This presentation reveals the magic of compound interest, showing how it can make your money grow exponentially over time. Students will learn the difference between simple and compound growth and discover a powerful mental math shortcut, the Rule of 72, to estimate their investment returns.
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Are you using the right tools to manage your money safely and effectively?
This presentation builds a foundational “Saving Toolkit” for managing your money. Students will compare banks and credit unions, learn the specific purpose of checking, savings, money market, and CD accounts, and evaluate the pros and cons of different payment methods like cash, debit, and credit.
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How are you taxed on money you don’t earn from a paycheck?
Moving beyond income tax, this presentation explores the taxes associated with building and transferring wealth. Students will learn how investments are taxed (capital gains), understand the rules for passing assets to the next generation (estate, gift, and inheritance tax), and discover how property taxes fund local communities.
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What if you could legally lower the amount of income the government taxes?
This lesson walks students through the key decisions needed to prepare their first tax return. Students will learn how to choose a filing status, understand the power of deductions and pre-tax contributions to lower their taxable income, and compare different methods for filing.
Click Here to download this presentation in Google Drive
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How can you build multiple income streams and protect them from forces outside your control?
This presentation explores both the “offense” and “defense” of earning money. Students will first learn about five distinct sources of income beyond a traditional paycheck, then analyze five major economic factors—like inflation and technological change—that can impact their financial future.
Click Here to download this presentation in Google Drive
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How do you get paid correctly and avoid surprises on tax day?
This presentation is a practical guide to the essential tax forms every worker needs to know. From the W-4 you fill out when hired to the Form 1040 you file with the IRS, this lesson clarifies the purpose of each document and shows how they fit together in the annual tax cycle.
Click Here to download this presentation in Google Drive
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Ever wonder why your take-home pay is so much less than your salary?
This presentation breaks down the key payroll deductions impacting your pay stub. Students will learn the difference between gross and net pay and understand where their money goes, from funding national services with federal taxes to supporting retirees through FICA.
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Learning to invest shouldn’t feel like a mystery — this lesson makes it clear. The Buying Your First Stock module guides students step-by-step from understanding what a stock is to making their first trade in a virtual portfolio.
Here’s what’s inside:
Intro to key vocabulary: stock, ticker symbol, portfolio
Activities for researching companies and generating trading ideas
Exercises to read and interpret stock quotes (bid, ask, volume, etc.)
A virtual trading exercise: students “buy” a stock through PersonalFinanceLab and compare results
Discussion prompts and group work to reflect on risk, strategy, and investment choices
Get the full lesson plan:
Comparison shopping is more than just finding the lowest price. It’s about knowing what features, warranties, and hidden costs are worth paying for. This lesson walks students through smart strategies to evaluate offers and make better purchase decisions.
In this lesson, you’ll find:
Discussion prompts to sharpen critical thinking about deals
Worksheets and exercises to compare products side by side
Activities examining warranty, quality, total cost, and value
Guidance on identifying hidden fees or deceptive marketing claims
Get the full lesson here:
Buying a car is exciting—but the real cost goes far beyond the sticker price. Our Owning a Car lesson walks students through everything from insurance and fuel to maintenance, registration, and depreciation, so they can make smarter decisions before they buy.
What’s inside:
Discussion prompts to unpack surprising “hidden” costs
Worksheets to calculate total cost of ownership
Activities on loans, interest, and insurance
Group research comparing different vehicle types
Check out the lesson here:
The PersonalFinanceLab Stock Game is a fun and interactive way for students to learn about investing and the stock market — without the risks of real money. Teachers use it in class to bring financial literacy to life, while students get hands-on experience trading stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds in a simulated environment.
Through the stock game, students:
It’s a classroom favorite because it makes abstract financial concepts practical and engaging.
We recently hosted a webinar where we walked through exactly how the Stock Game works, including setup tips and ways to tie it into your lessons. You can download the presentation slides here, and watch the recording below.
If you’d like help getting started, we’ve got you covered:
Check out our recent webinar that walks you through the many benefits of using PersonalFinanceLab in the classroom.
Our interactive Budget Game is a powerful teaching tool that helps students practice real-world money management skills in a safe, engaging environment. Students take on the role of managing their own monthly budget—balancing income, expenses, savings goals, and unexpected life events. Along the way, they learn critical financial literacy concepts like:
The game turns abstract lessons into hands-on experiences, giving students both confidence and practical skills they can use for life.
Watch the webinar below, and download the presentation slides here.
Missed the live webinar and have questions? Book a 1:1 demo with one of our dedicated account managers, and they’ll walk you through how to bring the Budget Game (and the rest of PersonalFinanceLab’s tools) into your classroom with ease.
We recently hosted a live webinar where we walked teachers through how to bring budgeting and investing to life in the classroom with PersonalFinanceLab.
In this session, we explored the Budget Game, designed to teach students how to balance quality of life with saving for the future—helping them learn not just to save, but to spend responsibly. We also showcased the Stock Market Game, where students can research, trade, and invest in real time without spending a dime, practicing responsible investing skills in a safe environment.
Teachers also got a tour of classroom resources and reporting tools, including customizable lessons and flexible platform settings to align with their classroom goals.
Missed the live webinar and have questions? Book a 1:1 demo with one of our dedicated account managers, and they’ll help you get started.
Are you looking for an engaging way to teach students about personal finance and investing? Our latest webinar, Introduction to the Best Budget and Stock Game for Schools, is here to help!
In this session, we show educators how to:
Don’t just teach finance—bring it to life. With our Budget and Stock Games, your students won’t just learn—they’ll experience real-world money management and investing, all in a fun, competitive, and fully trackable environment.
Missed the live webinar and still have questions?
No problem—our team has you covered! Click the link below to book a 1:1 demo with one of our dedicated account managers. They’ll walk you through everything, answer your questions, and help you get started with PersonalFinanceLab.
The Fall semester is already here, and we’re excited to announce our newest slate of updates!
Want a full walkthrough of these updates in action? Watch our recorded webinar where we demonstrate the new features, answers questions, and shares best practices for using them in class.
Car ownership is expensive – and not for everyone (especially students still in school)! Our latest update to the Budget Game allows teachers to set their class session to “Public Transit Mode” in place of car ownership.
See Details of the new Public Transit Mode!
PersonalFinanceLab’s Stock Game has always featured US corporate and treasury bonds, but our latest update also allows students to trade bonds from 5 other countries!
Learn More About Our International Bonds Support
Our Stock Game has been available in a variety of languages since we launched years ago, but until now the Budget Game and Learning Library have been only available in English. This Fall we are releasing our complete translation for our entire platform! Spanish and French will be available starting in September, with more languages being released throughout the Fall semester!
Learn More About Our Translations
The Budget Game just got a lot more fun – all 4 of our new Mini-Games launched at the end of the summer, and continually refined ahead of the Fall semester! These include our “Cafe Game” to earn extra money, our “Wealth Whiz Quiz” to prove financial concept mastery to earn bonus points, our “Comparison Shopping” grocery game to give students practice in finding the best deal, and our “Weekend Planning” game where students pack their schedule with activities that can fit their budget!
Learn More About Our Mini-Games
As part of our routine update to our Learning Library, all of our lessons have a make-over to their titles! The new titles make each lesson more engaging and applicable to the real world for students, but still maintain the same level of educational content and rigorous standards alignment.
Our Stock Comparison Tool is an exercise to teach students the basic of conducting investment research – what data to look for, how to track it, and how to compare two companies. We updated our tool to now include an Export button, allowing students to save their comparison for later – including making it easier to use in homework or other assignments they submit for grading!
Learn More About Our Stock Comparison Tool
We have more enhancements and updates also rolling out through the Fall semester – culminating in a major update to our Assignments system that we plan to launch for the Spring semester.
Happy Learning!
-The PFinLab Team
We are excited the newest addition to our Budgeting Game – Public Transit Mode!
One of the major expenses in the game is owning a car. Car ownership comes with several bills players need to pay (including a Car Insurance and Gasoline bill), plus various events throughout the game itself relating to other expenses involved in owning a car, like oil changes, parking tickets and repairing wear-and-tear.
However, car ownership is not necessarily part of the financial reality every student will face, especially while they are still going to college and only working part-time. This led us to release our new Public Transit Mode!
When a player is in Public Transit Mode, they will no longer be issued a bill for their Car Payment or Car Insurance payments, and in place of their “Gasoline” bill each month, they will need to pay for a monthly Public Transit Pass.
All events in the game pertaining to car ownership are instead replaced with trials and tribulations involving taking the bus or other mode of public transit – buses might be late (making them late for work), stranger spills coffee on their favorite shirt, or even needing to rent a car to visit distant relatives.
When setting up your next class session, you will have the option to choose how your students get around town – owning a car, or taking public transit:
This setting can be chosen independently for “Part Time” mode (while the player is a college student with a part-time job) and “Full Time” mode (after the player finishes school and is working at a regular job). This is a class-wide setting (not per-student) in order to make the game experience more consistent – and rankings more competitive – across your class.
When you choose “Public Transit Mode” for one of the game modes, the following other changes take affect:
Teachers may also want to set up the game such that the scenario is that the student’s parents may have given the car as a gift, or cover the car insurance payments while the student is in school – but still have their players own a car (with the other advantages and costs involved).
These custom scenarios can also be handled in the Budget Game. Teachers can set the “Car Payment” or “Car Insurance” bills to zero – which prevents them from being issued to students (and allows teachers to then lower the game hourly wages to be more realistic for a part-time worker).
This also applies to other bills in the game too – while Rent, TV/Internet, Groceries, and Cell Phone plan bills are required (as students make choices involving these bills at the start of the game), teachers can turn off any other bill by setting its cost to 0 – giving the flexibility of a simplified game for younger students or having a bigger difference in game difficulty between part-time and full-time mode.
We hope you are as excited as we are to get your class up and running!
-The PFinLab Team
PersonalFinanceLab is excited to announce the addition of International Bonds to our bonds trading simulation!
Until now, PersonalFinanceLab has allowed students to trade a wide range of US corporate and treasury bonds – based on the settings chosen by their instructor when setting up their class stock game. Our new addition adds an additional selection of corporate and government bonds from the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. Students can choose between countries with a new “Exchange” selector that has been added to the Bonds trading pit.
Like with Stocks, teachers can choose which Bonds exchanges are allowed for their class. The available bonds shares the same allowed exchanges as stocks – so enabling French stocks trading now also allows French Bond trading (if your class allows bonds at all).
We hope this brings an exciting new dimension to building a fixed-income portfolio for classes!
Happy Trading!
-The PFinLab Team
PersonalFinanceLab’s stock game has been available in a variety of languages since inception, but until now our Budget Game and Curriculum Library have been supported exclusively in English.
As one of our biggest enhancements for Fall 2025, we are excited to announce full translation across our entire platform* – including the entirety of or Budgeting Game and Assignments!
This change will be a gradual roll-out over the course of the Fall 2025 semester, with incremental updates supported by feedback from teachers and students.
The first additional languages we will be supporting are French and Spanish in the initial roll-out. Before the launch of the Spring Semester, we will also be introducing translations in Arabic and Simplified Chinese. Additional languages will be supported in the future, but made available based on school demand.
Happy Learning!
-The PFinLab Team
*Translation applies to text-based assets across the platform. Most images that feature text will continue to only be available in English. Video content will be updated with closed captions, with captions available in the supported translations. 3rd party assets, such as our Research Tool and Stock Screener Tool, will continue to only be available in English, as we do not have direct control over their functionality.
The PersonalFinanceLab Budget Game is a unique resource for schools to teach students about money management in the real world. As one of the cornerstone decisions students make each “week” of the simulation is how they are going to spend their weekend, through our student-driven “Weekend Choice” mechanic.
Besides simply choosing what area students want to focus on during each weekend of the game, each choice also triggers a unique Mini-Game to help really drive up the classroom engagement and keep students as part of the action!
Students choose to “Work Extra Hours” when they need to earn extra cash to make their budgets solvent for the month. In the real world, the equivalent would be “gig work”, but for simplification our game allows participants to pick up an extra shift bussing tables at a cafe.
Extra money is earned by serving up orders at the cafe, and taking the dirty dishes back to the kitchen afterwards. The game counts down, and cash is earned based on how many orders can be filled before the time runs out.
Learn More About The Cafe Game
“Studying” during the budget game has two impacts for how the long-term game plays out for participants. First, neglecting to study for too long will result in failed exams – and expensive tutors. But students who choose to frequently “Study” while they are still in school (or its equivalent, “Professional Development” while a full-time worker) will gradually earn raises on their job – permanently boosting their paycheck for a long-term advantage.
The Wealth Whiz Quiz captures this aspect of Studying – students are thrust into the spotlight in a 10-question game show covering financial topics.
Correctly answering questions gives students bonus points that directly apply to their game score – while getting questions wrong can hurt their score instead!
Learn More About The Wealth Whiz Quiz
Choosing to Socialize on the weekend is a great way for students to boost their Quality of Life – and our Time Management mini-game lets them try to pack their Saturday full of fun – on a budget!
In the Time Management game, students are presented with a variety of activities they can choose to embark on with their friends. Different activities are only available at certain times of day, and are located in different neighborhoods across the city where they live. Activities take up time and cost money – and travel time can be significant when travelling far between neighborhoods based on their distance on the map.
Players choose which events they can fit in their schedule (and budget), and earn Quality of Life points based on how much they can pack in while still meeting their monthly savings goals.
Learn More About The Time Management Game
Choosing to take care of household chores is a good way to save money in the long run – neglecting too long can result in fines from your landlord, a cockroach infestation, or worse. Taking care of chores also launches our Comparison Grocery Shopping Game!
In the comparison shopping game, the player is stopping by the grocery store to pick up some items on their shopping list. They need to buy 3 different types of items, and each item has 3 alternatives to choose from. Each alternative has a different quantity (be it units per package or net weight), a “Quality Score” indicating their perceived quality of the item, and a cost (which may be on sale!).
Players are challenged to try to find the best deal on each item, with Quality of Life points earned based on the Quality and Quantity of each purchase, plus bonus points if they were able to choose the “best deal”!
Learn More About The Comparison Shopping Game
The mini-games are just one of the cornerstones that make the PersonalFinanceLab Budget Game the most engaging financial simulation for students!
Happy Learning!
-The PFinLab Team
Part of Our Summer 2025 Content Update
We’re excited to announce a fresh new look for your favorite PersonalFinanceLab assignments! As part of our Summer 2025 Content Update, we’ve updated all assignment titles to make them more engaging, easier to understand, and more classroom-friendly.
Whether you’re assigning a budgeting game, stock market simulation, or personal finance module, you’ll now see updated titles designed to better reflect the learning goals and keep students interested from the start.
Good news: If you’ve copied assignments from previous semesters, they’ll still work with the new titles—no extra steps needed.
Expect to see titles like “Building Wealth” transformed into “A Strategy to Build Wealth, Not Debt” or “Car Insurance” become “Car Insurance: How to Lower Your Rates.” It’s all part of helping students better connect with the content right from the first click.
These updates are just one of the many ways we’re working to make PersonalFinanceLab even better for the upcoming school year. Stay tuned—there’s more to come!
| Old Title | New Title |
| Lesson – Lesson – Break Free From Money Stress with a Budget | Lesson – Lesson – Break Free From Money Stress with a Budget |
| Lesson – Proven Techniques to Stop Overspending | Proven Techniques to Stop Overspending |
| Lesson – What is Money? | Lesson – What is Money? |
| A Strategy to Build Wealth, Not Debt | |
| Use the Compound Interest Calculator | Watch How Your Savings Could Grow (A lesson on compound interest) |
| Lesson – Achieve Financial Goals with a Spending Plan | Achieve Financial Goals with a Spending Plan |
| Lesson – Pay Yourself First: A Simple Yet Powerful Way to Build Wealth | A Simple yet Powerful Way to Build Wealth |
| Preparing for Spending Shocks | How to Prepare for Unexpected Expenses |
| Financial Records and Receipts | Receipts: What to Keep and Why |
| Lesson – How Do You Stop Impulse Purchases? | How Do You Stop Impulse Purchases? |
| Managing Bills | The Art of Juggling Many Bills in a Pinch |
| Lesson – Evaluating Big-Ticket Purchases | Evaluating Big-Ticket Purchases |
| Lesson – The Cost of Raising a Family | The Cost of Raising a Family |
| Use the Net Worth Calculator | Get a Snapshot of Your Financial Health (A lesson on Net Worth) |
| Use the Buy vs Lease Calculator | Rent or Buy: Which is Right for You? |
| Use the Home Budgeting Calculator | Find Out Your Monthly Home Budget |
| Lesson – A Beginner’s Guide to Borrowing Wisely | A Beginner’s Guide to Borrowing Wisely |
| Lesson – Credit Cards: Terms, Fees, and More | Credit Cards: Terms, Fees, and More |
| Buying a Car | The Car Buying Checklist |
| Good Debt, Bad Debt | How to Use Debt to Your Advantage |
| Use the Car Loans Calculator | Calculate Your Car Loan Payments |
| Lesson – What to Do When You Need Money Fast | What to Do When You Need Money Fast |
| Student Loans | Financing Your Education |
| Lesson – Mortgage Options for First-Time Homebuyers | Mortgage Options for First-Time Homebuyers |
| Use the Credit Card Payments Calculator | Calculate the True Cost of Credit Card Debt |
| Lesson – What Your Credit Report Says About You | What Your Credit Report Says About You |
| Lesson – How Borrowers Manage Personal Debt | How Borrowers Manage Personal Debt |
| Lesson – Getting Help With Debt Repayment | Getting Help With Debt Repayment |
| Lesson – Debt Relief: Is Consolidation the Answer? | Debt Relief: Is Consolidation the Answer? |
| Debt Negotiation | How to Negotiate With Creditors |
| Debt Snowball and Avalanche | Debt Snowball and Avalanche |
| Lesson – What Is Bankruptcy? | What Is Bankruptcy? |
| Lesson – What’s in Your Compensation Package? | What’s in Your Compensation Package? |
| Workplace Benefits | What Benefits to Look for in a Job Offer |
| Career Development | Planning Your Career Path |
| Employer and Employee Rights and Responsibilities | The Ultimate Employee Guide |
| Unemployment and Other Programs | Public Financial Assistance Programs |
| Lesson – Choosing the Best Banking Option for You | Choosing the Best Banking Option for You |
| Lesson – How Debit Cards Work | How Debit Cards Work |
| Automatic Payments | Automatic Payments: Convenience vs. Risk |
| Taxation Overview | Tax Basics You Need to Know |
| Tax Filing and the Form 1040 | Income Tax Filing Tips & Tricks |
| Practice Filing The Form 1040 | Get Practice Filing a Sample Tax Return |
| Lesson – Sales Tax: Who Pays, Collects, and Why? | Sales Tax: Who Pays, Collects, and Why? |
| Biggest Mistakes of Job Seekers | Biggest Mistakes of Job Seekers |
| Acing Job Interviews | Acing Job Interviews |
| How To Choose an Internship | Are Internships Worth It? |
| Using Keywords In Your Resume | How to Get Past Resume Software |
| What is Wealth? | What is Wealth? |
| Charitable Giving | A Guide to Effective Charitable Donations |
| Preparing for Retirement | The Secret to a Comfortable Retirement |
| Use the Saving to be a Millionaire Calculator | Crack the Code to Becoming a Millionaire |
| Consumer Rights and Responsibilities | Protect Yourself as a Consumer |
| Classifying Products and Services | Why You Buy What You Buy |
| Lesson – Tax Credits & Deductions You Need to Know | Tax Credits & Deductions You Need to Know |
| Lesson – Uncovering Hidden Income Taxes You Owe | Uncovering Hidden Income Taxes You Owe |
| When to Hire a Tax Professional | Do You Need a Tax Professional? |
| What Makes a Contract Valid? | The 6 Elements of a Binding Contract |
| Renter’s Insurance | What’s Not Covered in Renter’s Insurance? |
| Home Owner’s Insurance | What Damage Does Home Insurance Cover? |
| Rental Agreements and Homeowner’s Associations | Rules for Renters & Homeowners |
| Lesson – Car Insurance: How to Lower Your Rates | Car Insurance: How to Lower Your Rates |
| Lesson – Life Insurance: The Ultimate Safety Net | Life Insurance: The Ultimate Safety Net |
| What Are Annuities | Is an Annuity Right for You? |
| Disability Insurance | Don’t Let Disability Derail Your Finances |
| Lesson – Why Health Insurance is So Expensive | Why Health Insurance is So Expensive |
| Protecting Yourself Against Fraud | How to Avoid Identity Theft, Scams and Fraud |
| Using Spreadsheets – Comparing Car Financing Options | Find Your Best Car Loan Deal |
| Lesson – Tame Your Financial Paperwork | Tame Your Financial Paperwork |
| Reconciling Accounts | Balance Your Books in 10-Minutes |
| Tax Audits | What Is a Tax Audit? |
| Work VS Study | Go to College or Start Working? |
| Simple and Living Wills | Who Gets Your Stuff When You’re Gone? |
| Lesson – Starting a Business 101 | Starting a Business 101 |
| Income Taxes in Canada | The Basics of Filing Taxes in Canada |
| Pay Yourself First in Canada | #1 Rule for Building Wealth in Canada |
| Canadian Credit Reports | Your Canadian Credit Report |
| Planning for Retirement in Canada | A Guide to Retiring in Canada |
| Types of Canadian Insurance | Insurance Basics Everyone Should Know |
| Protecting Against Fraud in Canada | How to Spot a Scam in Canada |
| Bankruptcy in Canada | How Bankruptcy Ruins Your Credit |
| Lesson – A Beginner’s Guide to Investing in Stocks | A Beginner’s Guide to Investing in Stocks |
| What is a Ticker Symbol? | Why Investors Need to Use Ticker Symbols |
| Getting (and Understanding) Stock Quotes | How to Read a Stock Quote like a Pro |
| Why Invest in Stocks vs. Just Saving? | |
| Building a Diversified Portfolio | Why You Should Diversify Your Portfolio |
| Getting Trading Ideas | 5 Ways to Get Trading Ideas |
| Navigating The Site | How to Navigate The Platform? |
| Order Types | How to Use Order Types? |
| Trading Stocks Tutorial | How to Trade Stocks? |
| Lesson – A Simple Explanation of ETFs | A Simple Explanation of ETFs |
| Lesson – The Pros and Cons of Mutual Funds | The Pros and Cons of Mutual Funds |
| Trading Mutual Funds Tutorial | How to Trade Mutual Funds? |
| What are Bonds? | Getting Started with Bond Investing |
| Trading Bonds Tutorial | How to Trade Bonds? |
| Understanding Margin Trading | Margin & Short Selling Explained |
| Lesson – Finding the Right Brokerage Account | How to Choose a Brokerage Account? |
| Investment Research | How to do Investing Research? |
| How to Choose and Compare Stocks | How to Choose Stocks Strategically |
| Lesson – Decoding What Moves The Market | Decoding What Moves The Market |
| Lesson – How to Read an Income Statement | Lesson – How to Read an Income Statement |
| Lesson – How to Read a Balance Sheet | What a Company Owns vs. Owes (A lesson on Balance Sheets) |
| What Is A Cash Flow Statement | The Cash Flow Statement Explained |
| Lesson – How to Develop an Investing Strategy | How to Develop an Investing Strategy |
| Lesson – Want to Work in Finance? | Want to Work in Finance? |
| What are Cryptocurrencies? | What are Cryptocurrencies? |
| Use the Investment Return Calculator | Model Your Financial Future (A Lesson on Investment Growth) |
| Use the Net Present Value Calculator | Net Present Value (NPV) Calculator |
| Basic Research and Comparing Stocks | How to Research & Compare Stocks |
