14 Personal Finance Project Examples & Ideas

Want to introduce a money project to your students? Check out these personal finance project examples for middle and high school.

Every so often, I find a fun and interesting personal finance project example that I think should be passed on so that other educators can use it.

So today, I thought it’d be helpful to highlight them all in an article (that I update periodically with new ideas and examples as they come to me).

You can use these to round out your financial literacy class with an overall project due at the end of the semester, OR, squeeze one of these projects in for students to work on mainly at home if you don’t have a dedicated fin lit class.

Perhaps you are into project-based learning, and one of these could be the perfect anchor to your entire semester.

There are lots of uses!

Financial Literacy Projects for High School Students (Semester-Long)

These are the big ones – the personal finance projects that can anchor a whole semester or serve as the final project in a financial literacy class. Each one has students build something they walk away with, from real classrooms and schools already using them (a few ideas I've included haven't been done before).

Mr. Brennan’s Personal Finance Project

This teacher has created a personal finance project geared towards financial independence that accounts for 20% of his students’ grades in Economics.

Students are tasked with making a budget, finding an apartment, filling out a rental application, looking into utilities, meal planning, and all the things that go into getting that first apartment on their own.

He’s got a Part II, with tons of lessons around the theme of Staying Within Your Budget.

11 Personal Finance Projects from Atlanta Fed (PDF)

The Atlanta Fed has this great resource with 10 different personal finance projects to use throughout the year (rubric included).

And…it’s available for free!

Author Julie Kornegay suggests that you have students complete 10 projects, each worth 20 points. Have them create a three-ring binder with each of their projects, and make it a large part of their final grade.

Working through each of the following projects will give your students a financial strategy to take with them:

1. Expense tracking
2. Setting financial goals
3. Balance sheets and cash flow statements
4. Taxes
5. Creating a budget
6. Credit reports
7. Purchasing a vehicle
8. Saving and investing for the long-term
9. Important financial documents
10. Retirement savings
11. Insurance inventory

Hint: she also gives several tips for how to keep everyone feeling safe doing these projects – since they’ll be sharing sensitive information at some point.

Mr. Saulino’s Personal Finance Webquest Project

If you’re in Mr. Saulino’s Social Studies course, then you’ll be completing a project called Personal Finance Webquest.

Each student pretends they are 22 years old, and they have $7,000 in their savings account to spend, or not spend, as they wish.

Students are required to stay within their budget while accomplishing the following:

• find an occupation
• set up and maintain a budget based on your income
• rent and furnish an apartment or purchase a home
• purchase a car
• set up an investment portfolio

There are links provided in each section to help guide students in finding the information they need to complete their tasks.

GEn Z Money Project

Based on CNBC’s Millennial Money video series, this high school teacher developed an after-school personal finance project where students plan what their life looks like at age 30.

Students complete a:

• Futures Thinking Activity
• Personal Values Activity
• Vision Board Activity
• Budget and Salary Activity
• Career Activity

And then students presented everything using Google Slides presentations.

Personal Finance Culminating Project

One teacher found her students were super bored with personal finance topics, so she decided to change things up.

Students need to pick 5 topics from a big list and write a brief post about them (150-300 words) or a podcast summary.

Written pieces were posted to a classroom blog, and the quiz for the unit was for each student to read 5 others’ blogs and summarize what they learned.

Apparently, this was quite the hit!

Included in that article are the Personal Finance Culminating Assignment and Investigations Rubric.

Hint: if your class would rather run a money plan than write one, I built the Mt. Everest Money Simulation for exactly that. Students become Erik's Everest Ground Support Team – he's 28, he wants to summit, and they have to get him to his savings goal through five key decisions and three money problems on the mountain. It's choose-your-own-adventure in PowerPoint or Google Slides, with audio dispatches and Everest footage, and no two runs come out the same. Plan on 2.5–3 hours, or split it across four modules. I researched it from 30+ mountaineering books after winning the 2017 Plutus Foundation Grant to build it, and I've run it with kids from 8 to 18. Getting students engaged is half the battle (who am I kidding – 80%). Everest Money Simulation – Class Self-Study, $47 Educator License.

Finance Projects for Students – Shorter Ideas You Can Run in a Few Weeks

Don't have a dedicated fin lit class? These finance projects for students fit inside a unit, an after-school club, or a few weeks of homework.

Project-Based Learning Finance Project

What a cool idea – in this PBL, students meet different families (adults pretending to be clients) and see what their financial needs and desires are.

They interview them to find out more about their lives, and what they’re looking for. They also get a printout of their financial situation.

It’s like they’re playing financial planner (in fact, the teacher had a financial planner come in to talk about her job and go through examples)!

Youth Cash Transfer Program

40 students inside Rooted School Indianapolis were chosen to receive $50/week, for 40 weeks (adding up to $2,000 in total).

And here’s the kicker: they’re allowed to spend it however they’d like.

Talk about a bit of a fish bowl experiment, where teens can practice both receiving money and spending money without huge real-world consequences.

To be honest, I’m following this study because I want to see how things turn out (researchers are going to be monitoring and studying the results of this program).

Build a Classroom Food Pantry

Here’s a school that allowed a student to create and run a food pantry (as part of his Eagle Scout service project)…and now it runs continually as a grocery store experience for students that helps the community.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of information on this. But, could be a great project to develop at your own school now that you have the idea.

Psst: Want more? Don’t forget to check out these budget project for middle school students, and budget projects for high school students.

Market Day

Do you have a market day at your school? You know, where students come up with an idea for what to make or do in order to sell it to their peers, the community, etc. on a Market Day at the school?

While it’s not entirely a personal finance project – it’s got more to do with entrepreneurship and running a business – I still thought it was worth mentioning here.

I've got an article on 22 Simple Market Day Ideas, and it's gotten a lot of attention. Also, here's a market day lesson on pricing products for students.

My Pet Plan Project

Most kids, at some point, want to own a pet.

Take this desire, and let them learn some critical money lessons with it.

Have each of your students come up with a plan for buying and maintaining a pet for six months.

They get to decide things like:

• What type of pet to buy
• Where to buy their pet
• What accessories to purchase
• A feeding plan for their pet with costs

My First Car: The First Six Months

Many tweens and teens are looking to buy their first car in the coming few years.

But, how exactly are they supposed to do that? What are the steps? What are the estimated costs?

Then, how much does it cost to run their new car for the first six months?

You can also have them do things like calculate the cost of buying a new car each year for three years, versus paying one-off and riding it another 7 years (also, opportunity costs).

Here's how to save up for a car as a teenager.

Buyer’s Remorse Project

Have your students save each of their receipts for one month leading up to this project (you can hand them a special envelope to remind them to do it).

When one month is up, have students do things like:

• Fill in a spending ledger
• Look at the totality of their spending over the entire period
• Divide it up by needs vs. wants
• Figure out percentages spent on needs vs. wants
• Figure out satisfaction for each purchase
• Categorize by days of week/types of stores to pinpoint/open their eyes to some of their spending habits
• Go through a tradeoff exercise
• Run through a lesson on money values – shuffle anonymous sheets up and hand them out to ask others what their satisfaction level would be for the various spending (to find out that everyone prioritizes and values their money differently)
• Have them read through these 7 smart ways to spend your graduation money

Ask students things like "Why might someone else’s buyer’s remorse not be yours? Did you have more buyer’s remorse when it was your money spent than looking at how someone else spent their money? Why do you think that is?

Three-Budget-Scenarios Project (Life After High School)

This one's mine, and it's the project I'd hand a senior who says "I have no idea what I'm doing after graduation."

Instead of budgeting one made-up life, students budget three real ones – the paths they're actually weighing. An apartment and a job. College. Trade school. Each gets its own budget on the same teen budget worksheet, with real numbers: what that path pays (or costs) in month one, what rent looks like in your town, what's left over.

Then they lay the three side by side and compare. Which one has breathing room? Which one only works if nothing goes wrong? That comparison is the lesson – not the arithmetic.

It runs in about two weeks, and it pairs well with the First Year Out project above if a student wants to go deeper on the path they pick. Full steps, plus the scenario brainstorm list, are in Budget Projects for High School Students.

I hope I've inspired you with some of these personal finance project examples. And I'd love to hear your own – please share in the comments to help other educators with ideas.