Introducing Our New Personal Finance Curriculum

Teachers have been asking us for more personal finance lessons for a while now. That didn’t surprise us given the rise of personal finance education across the country. In 1998, just one state required high school students to take a standalone personal finance course to graduate. Today, 26 states do (often at the expense of economics), and 37 states require schools to offer a standalone personal finance course (Council for Economic Education, 2026; Pelletier, 2025). Support for personal finance education is, on the whole, a positive. The push to ensure that every student has some exposure to budgeting, credit, investing, and insurance reflects a genuine recognition that these are life skills that matter. 

What's often overlooked, though, is that financial education is the application of the economic way of thinking to personal finance decisions. A robust personal finance education that prepares students to transfer what they have learned in the classroom to their future lives must be grounded in economics; otherwise, students are simply memorizing terms and rules to meet a graduation requirement. That's the gap we have set out to close, and it's why we are building this personal finance course. That’s also why the first unit in this new curriculum will bear some resemblance to the first unit in our economics course. We’ll start by introducing students to principles of economic thinking in Unit 1 so they can apply that decision-making toolkit to financial choices as they move through Units 2-5 where we will cover traditional personal finance topics.

We have spent the last several months researching the field and creating structures and systems to ensure that each lesson we release is cohesive, consistent, and lives up to the quality you’ve come to expect from us. We are thrilled to announce that five lessons from our brand-new on-level, one-semester personal finance course for high schoolers are now live! 

Why We're Starting at the End

Just like we did as we built our units for the economics course, we built the assessment preview and the Unit 1: Fundamentals of Decision Making summative assessment before any of the content lessons that come before them. That's backward design in action: the practice of starting curriculum development with the assessment, so every lesson that leads up to it is built with that end goal already in view. Once we knew exactly what we wanted students to master in the first unit (apply the principles of economic thinking to a real decision and set a SMART goal from it) we could build backward from there, making sure every lesson leading up to it supports student mastery.

Lesson 1.10: Using Economic Thinking to Make Better Decisions, the unit summative assessment, asks students to read a friend's text messages about a real dilemma (should Amara go to her best friend's game or her school dance?), apply two principles of economic thinking to the decision, and write a SMART goal tied to their recommendation, scored against a rubric with Novice, Proficient, and Advanced levels. Lesson 1.9: Assessment Preview gets students ready for the assessment; they preview the rubric and practice scoring sample responses before writing their own. 

With the end goal in mind, we created Lesson 1.2: Scarcity and Choice: Designing Your Living Space. If you love kicking off your economics course with Lesson 1.2: Packing for a River Trip, you're sure to love starting your personal finance course with Scarcity and Choice: Designing Your Living Space. It follows the same experience-first design: students are given a shared $750 budget to design an apartment living room with a partner, before they've heard a single economics/personal finance term. As they debate what to buy, what to skip, and how to compromise, they’re already experiencing and working through scarcity and our four principles of economic thinking (cost-benefit principle, opportunity cost principle, marginal principle, and interdependence principle) without even realizing it. The debrief explicitly ties their choices to economics. This models the thinking they will apply when they complete the summative assessment. 

Lessons 1.3: Your Decision-Making Toolkit Part 1 and Lesson 1.4: Your Decision-Making Toolkit Part 2 pick up right where Lesson 1.2 leaves off, giving students the language for the thinking they were already doing as they designed their living rooms. In Lesson 1.3, students learn the cost-benefit and opportunity cost principles and put them to work right away, analyzing a real-world issue like buy now, pay later services. Lesson 1.4 adds the marginal and interdependence principles, then moves students from understanding the principles to applying all four to personal finance scenarios. Each principle comes with an anchor question students can carry with them for the rest of the course ("Benefits beat costs?" "Or what?" "One more?" "What else?"). Lesson 1.4 also opens with students reading a friend's text messages and advising him, an early rehearsal for the dilemma they'll face on the summative assessment. Publishing these five lessons together lets you see backward design in action: where students are headed and the first steps in getting them there.

Personal Finance as Applied Economics

Our goal in creating this personal finance curriculum is to frame personal finance as economic thinking applied to the decisions people face across a lifetime. Our curriculum grounds personal finance in the same four core economic principles our economics course is built on: cost-benefit, opportunity cost, marginal thinking, and interdependence, and will return to them again and again, in new financial contexts. That repetition is what builds real reasoning. You’ll see these principles come up throughout the curriculum because they are the tools students will use to reason through all financial decisions.

What the Full Course Will Look Like

When complete our personal finance curriculum will be a one-semester, on-level course made up of 45-minute lessons divided into five units of study aligned with the National Standards for Personal Financial Education. Take a look at our Personal Finance Semester at a Glance for each unit's title, essential questions, and approximate timing. We are designing it using the same guiding principles as our economics curriculum (transfer, backward design, cognitive science, transparency) and what we learned from field-testing our economics course.

Quality Over Speed 

We want to be upfront about the timeline (and if you were with us as we built the economics curriculum, you know that) building a full curriculum, unit by unit, with the same rigor and care as our economics course, is a two-year project. Part of what takes time is that we dogfood every lesson before it's released. Our team works through each activity, handout, and assessment the way a student would, checking whether the directions are clear, the timing is realistic, and there's enough room on the page for a real answer. We'd rather take the time to create high-quality lessons than rush something out that doesn't hold up in your classroom. We'll announce new lessons as they become available, so you'll always know when there's something fresh to use.

Looking for personal finance content now? Start with Unit 5 of our economics course

While this new course is being built, you don't have to wait to bring personal finance into your classroom. Unit 5 of our existing economics course is made up of personal finance lessons grounded in the same economic thinking approach, ready to use today.

What's Next

Keep an eye out. We'll announce new lessons as they're ready. We will publish a semester pre- and post-assessment for the course, connected to the NEFE (National Endowment for Financial Education) assessment. It's nationally normed and scheduled to be available in late fall 2027, so you'll have a diagnostic tool to measure growth.

If you know a colleague who is teaching personal finance, encourage them to join us on this adventure by becoming an Econiful member.