New Career as a Finance Teacher “I’ve been passionate about finance my entire life; I’ve been working in it in some fashion for 27 years,” Mason Renfer said at the beginning of our interview. He was nominated by his students and won the “Nominate Your Teacher” Award in the Fall 2024 Financial Literacy Challenge on Read More…
In today’s complex financial landscape, Alabama teachers have a unique opportunity to shape the financial futures of their students, and it starts with providing them with the right resources to learn. PersonalFinanceLab was designed to engage your students with hands-on learning experiences, making complex financial concepts more accessible and fun to learn. Click on the Read More…
Our latest feature, the Wealth Whiz Quiz, transforms the Study option in the budget game into an interactive and educational experience, perfect for weekend learning. Why Add a Quiz Mini-Game? The Wealth Whiz Quiz is designed to make financial literacy exciting for students while reinforcing essential concepts. It turns studying into a fun, game show-style Read More…
Credit Karma is a popular online platform that offers free credit scores and reports from Equifax and TransUnion, two of the three major consumer credit bureaus. With over 100 million users, Credit Karma has become a go-to destination for individuals seeking to monitor and improve their credit health. In this review, we’ll dive into the Read More…
The Fall semester is here, and boy do we have a huge set of updates for you! New This Fall Combined Budget + Stock Game! This is a big one – teachers can now directly connect the Budgeting Game and Stock Games for their class with direct money transfers! This update means that instead of Read More…
To help teachers make the most of our interactive games and self-grading lessons, the PersonalFinanceLab team has updated our personal finance lesson plans. As part of this update, we’ve refreshed our content to reflect the latest trends and best practices in financial education. Each lesson plan includes: In each lesson plan we’ve included individual as Read More…
Learning about the stock market can be tricky for students, especially when they are just starting to understand the concepts of sectors and industries. Finding stocks to build a diversified portfolio can feel overwhelming. To help, we’re excited to introduce PersonalFinanceLab’s newest feature: Stocks by Sector. Introducing Stocks by Sector Stocks by Sector is an Read More…
Celebrating Success: Winners of the April Financial Literacy Challenge! Congratulations to the following students who emerged as winners in the Budget Game. Your dedication to financial literacy has truly paid off. Budget Game Winners Students were invited to participate in our Budgeting Game, competing with tens of thousands of other students from around the United States Read More…
Life is full of surprises, but not all of them are pleasant, especially when it comes to our finances. Unexpected expenses, also known as “Spending Shocks,” can derail even the most carefully crafted budgets, leaving you scrambling to cover the cost. According to CBS, over 60% of Americans would struggle to handle a $500 spending Read More…
When you have students participating in our stock game, it can be a struggle to get students to understand the basics of conducting research and comparing stocks. After all, between stock prices, the news, financial statements, stock charts, and what they hear from their friends, there is a lot of noise out there – and Read More…
Personal Finance is all about choices – like economics, it is a “dismal science” of choosing between trade-offs. In our budgeting game, we make a point to highlight these tradeoffs in how students choose to spend their free time each weekend – the Weekend Choice. The Weekend Choice is a decision students need to make Read More…
Investing is all about trying to maximize gains and minimizing losses. But we aren’t trying to teach students to be constantly watching every investment in their retirement account – what can the average investor use to protect their nest-egg without limiting their investment growth? Introducing Trailing Stops There are more options when investing than just Read More…
As your students explore PersonalFinanceLab, they’re not only dealing with budget details but also shaping their financial futures. We understand the importance of giving them tools that go beyond numbers. That’s why we’re excited to introduce our new presentation templates on economic concepts, making complicated financial topics easier for your students to grasp. What are Read More…
Hey Teachers – we’ve got an exciting update for our learning library for January 2024! New Video First up, we have a new video about how to manage receipts! This video is included in our lesson on “Managing Receipts” in our Personal Finance Learning Library for classes too. This joins our other video lessons covering Read More…
As students work through the PersonalFinanceLab Budgeting Game, they can see their class rankings, and might have some sense of how their game score or net worth has grown over time. But to really get a clear picture of how their financial future is shaping up, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a single Read More…
Learning how to file a federal income tax return is a cornerstone of every Personal Finance class. At PersonalFinanceLab, we’re excited to share our two activities specifically designed to help students learn how to file their own taxes once they start work. Filing Taxes Mini-Lesson As part of the Budget Game, we have a built-in Read More…
PersonalFinanceLab is packed to the brim with Financial Literacy Resources for schools, with the cornerstone being our library of 300+ standards-aligned, customizable lessons built into our Assignments engine that teachers can leverage for their class. Most of our lessons take students less than 15 minutes to complete, with a 3-5 question, automatically-graded quiz at the Read More…
PersonalFinanceLab’s Budget Game is an awesome tool to help teach students how to manage their money, pay bills on time, build up their credit, and get experience managing personal finances in a safe enviornment. But one of the cornerstones of true financial literacy is being able to look over financial records, like bank statements, and Read More…
One of our recently featured highlights was Assignment Rewards – a great way to incentivize students to complete their lessons on time. But as the teacher, how can you find which of your students earned their bonuses? Introducing Rewards Reporting When you set up your Assignment Rewards, you have the option to credit it to Read More…
We understand the increasing importance of personal finance education across the United States. That’s why we revised our financial literacy standards alignment to cover the majority of state academic standards. Our goal is to provide teachers and curriculum specialists with the resources they need to meet these requirements and deliver engaging learning experiences for their Read More…
At PersonalFinanceLab, we’re all about making Personal Finance easier to teach – and that means making sure teachers have the resources they need, right where they need them. With this in mind, we’re excited to announce a complete revamp of our Admin Dashboard! Meet Your New Dashboard The new Admin Dashboard was designed with ease-of-use Read More…
PersonalFinanceLab has over a dozen different reports – showing class registration information, budget game progress, stock game trades, and more. But you’re a busy teacher – you want one page that has exactly the information that is most relevant to your class. Don’t worry – our Custom Reporting tools are here to help! Custom Reports Read More…
Teaching personal finance is super important, but it can be a real hassle for teachers. It takes up a lot of their time and energy, which can lead to burnout. That’s where PersonalFinanceLab comes in! We get it and want to make things easier for educators. Our Teacher Resources page is like a gold mine Read More…
PersonalFinanceLab’s lesson library and assignments is an awesome way to add extra supplements to your class – you can even give students rewards in their stock portfolio or budget game checking account when they complete their lessons on time! But an article with a quiz at the end is not the best way to keep Read More…
In the world of educational technology, support matters as much as the tools themselves. PersonalFinanceLab understands this and stands out with its dedicated account managers. Every teacher at every school has their own dedicated account manager, whose main focus is ensuring teachers are using the PersonalFinanceLab platform with confidence, and being the teachers main point Read More…
PersonalFinanceLab’s Budget Game is an awesome tool to help students master the core skills needed to build a healthy financial future. But while students are progressing from month to month, it can be hard to tell how well they are doing – apart from their Class Ranking. With this in mind, we’re excited to announce Read More…
Using a stock game in class to teach about investing has been a staple of classrooms for decades. And for the whole time, building a portfolio has been a great group activity to help students work and learn together. But there is always one nagging problem with every group project – how can teachers measure Read More…
Picture this – you set up your class stock and budget games, along with assignments with tutorials and other info you want students to work through before finishing the games. But students always seem to want to play first, learn later. How can you incentivize them to get through their lessons and quizzes first? Introducing Read More…
The PersonalFinanceLab Budgeting Game is an excellent way to get students thinking about money over time – sometimes even TOO engaging. Teachers may set up a game lasting 18 virtual months with the intention for the class to progress through it over the course of 10 weeks, only to find some students moved too far Read More…
Every teacher has been there – you’ve had your students complete a formative quiz, and you want to review their answers to see where the class is struggling. All the quizzes are graded, but going through every student one-at-a-time to find patterns can be frustrating and time consuming. This is where our Class Quiz Summaries Read More…
Picture this – you are a student playing through the PersonalFinanceLab budgeting game, and you get a prompt – do you want to buy an aquarium? The cost is $100. In the real world, tons of people buy aquariums – it is a personal preference, but maybe you really like looking at fish. This is Read More…
You’ve got an important announcement for your students. Maybe you already posted it to your classroom page, and sent out an email. Even wrote it on the board in class. But if you want to be extra sure they see it, you also want to pop it in front of them while they’re working through Read More…
You’re planning to use the PersonalFinanceLab stock game in your class. You’ve used stock games before, and have seen some students buy something in the first week, then forget about it until the end of the semester. You want to encourage students to keep an eye on their portfolio, and re-balance it over time, just Read More…
Students can work in teams to complete this assignment. After logging into PersonalFinanceLab, they can go to the Stock Screener, in the Investing Research section to compare two companies from the same industry. Adjusting the Industry filter, they can compare any companies that trade on the US stock exchange. For example, students could choose Electronics/Appliances Read More…
For an 18-week class, we recommend that students write their own personal investing strategies that is separate from the group portfolio project. This allows each student to reflect on their current financial goals and how they intend to meet them. Students should choose one of the following financial goals: Based on their selection, students should Read More…
In this project we will be asking students to conduct a comparison-shopping exercise. They will first look at their most-preferred smartphone, and what it costs. They also need to specify what exactly makes this their preferred smartphone. Next, students will need to identify cell phone service providers that support their phone. This is the bulk Read More…
At the conclusion of the class period, students will build a final report and presentation synthesizing their experiences from both the budget game and stock game. Students will work in the same teams that they used for the Stock Game project to build this report. The Stock Game freezes all student portfolios automatically at the Read More…
In this project, we will be asking students to investigate different budgeting “apps” and resources that people use to help manage their money. Student will be challenged to use critical thinking to address two primary concerns with budgeting apps: Students are asked to identify at least two different budgeting apps or online resources, and do Read More…
This project is placed towards the end of the Investing unit, after each student has already begun to place a few trades. Ideally you will also have organized students into Teams as well. From this point of the class onwards, students will continue to be managing their portfolio as a project in the background (just Read More…
The stock game project utilizes PersonalFinanceLab’s stock game to teach students about investing. The key to a successful class stock game is making the game last as long as possible so students have exposure to the real markets and see how real-world news impacts their portfolio. Therefore, our course outline places the investing unit early Read More…
The second project of the budget game takes place after 7 months of play, immediately before beginning our unit on Careers. This timing is important – after 6 months, your students will have “graduated” from school in the game and begun their first full-time job, and so at this point students have gotten their first Read More…
Midpoint Check-In At this point students will be about 2/3 of the way through their stock game. The “Check-In” project is a short exercise for teams to evaluate how the group has performed so far, both relating to their original objective statements and how each team member has been fulfilling their roles. The primary objective Read More…
The Budget Game on PersonalFinanceLab is a long-term project where students will learn how to manage cash flow, savings goals, and credit over the course of your class. While the budget game is customizable for every class, for a 9-week course we recommend using a 12-month game (with each game taking 10-20 minutes to complete), Read More…
Order your PersonalFinanceLab 3-year school license and get a free ticker At PersonalFinanceLab.com, we have helped many schools transform their traditional classrooms into exciting Personal Finance or Business Labs by combining our gamified platform with colorful tickers carrying the latest stock prices and business news. Now with our partnership with our preferred ticker vendor, Rise Read More…
Did It Work? That is the biggest question teachers need to know after using any resource in the classroom – did it actually improve outcomes? And we at PersonalFinanceLab could not agree more. That is why a year ago we implemented our Pre- and Post- tests as part of our Assignments engine, allowing teachers to Read More…
Stash101 shuts down as a money management and investment simulation for schools, with all existing accounts disabled on January 31, 2023. What happened to Stash101? Stash is primarily a banking app, which also can include a personal checking account. Stash101 was a free “practice” version with other educational resources built in, designed for schools and Read More…
For Spring 2023, we have one of the most exciting additions we’ve ever seen to the PersonalFinanceLab Budget Game! One of the most consistent items of feedback we get from students every semester in our budget game was that most events of the game had no long-term visual impact – a choice to buy an Read More…
Hello! My name is Marta Watson, and I work at Bishop Kelly High School, in Idaho. I currently teach Business and Economics! Can you share a positive experience using PersonalFinanceLab? “Oh, my goodness, I can share 100 [examples]. The kids literally walk in with their laptops open talking to each other about their portfolios and their Read More…
PersonalFinanceLab is a financial simulation program that offers complete control to teachers to choose what their students experience and provides live customer service too. Launching a New Finance Department Bruce Groberman is the Director of Financial Education at North Point Schools, which operates 3 private schools (Boys School, Girls School and Co-Ed High School), in Read More…
Gamification has been a buzzword in education for over a decade. Teachers now have access to more games for the classroom than ever, with a dizzying array of options to fill a limited number of weeks in the classroom. To try to help teachers pick out the best possible options for your students, we want Read More…