11 Budget Games Free, Online, and Board Games

budgeting exercises

My budget likely won’t work for your family, and the budget that you create won’t work for mine. I like how this person’s monthly budgeting worksheet for kids corresponds with save-spend-share jars. It’s a way for your child to actually track their money, even if they’re using jars instead of a bank account. Create a busy budgeting calculation game for your students. To create this game, list income types and expenses on index cards.

Financial Literacy Activities for High School Students (PDFs included)

Prom is a perfect opportunity for your teen to learn how to budget. You can either use it to teach the how to budget for an occasion, OR, you can use it to teach them how to budget in general. Our world, and our banking world, is quickly turning to an app-based experience. Because of this, I think it’s important that your teenager gets their toes wet using money apps.

Lesson 5: Budgeting for Food

Create entertaining vision boards with their money maps using images from magazines, art supplies, and other resources. There are plenty of budgeting games that will help you achieve the financial literacy you need to live your adult life responsibly. However, financial skills are not simple to gain and apply to real life, especially for young adults.

ConsumerFinance.gov’s Bouncing Ball Budgets

Fortunately, there are fun and easy ways to help you improve your personal finance skills, including playing financial literacy games. Given the amount of monthly budget you have and your big expenses, it can be challenging to create an effective money management plan. Cashflow Board Game is created by Robert Kiyosaki (the guy who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad).

Heck, your kids might beg for more money activities after you introduce a few of these fun budgeting activities below. Alright…let’s move on to many more fun budgeting activities with PDFs and financial scenarios for students. If teens don’t learn smart skills like avoiding phishing scams, how to choose good passwords, or identifying fraudulent sites, they can lose everything they save. Take time to learn about the most common fraud issues, and teach them how to be responsible online.

Teaching by Topic: Budgeting

budgeting exercises

If you’re going to use them, you need to know how they work. Divide your class into groups, and ask each to research a different question about credit cards, like how they work, what interest they charge, and how to use them safely. Use grocery store websites to your advantage, and have kids take a virtual shopping trip.

This means each budget cycle is synced with their paycheck cycle, helping them to understand how to not overspending on their next payday. I’ve seen it time and time again (it happens to kids and adults, too). Then, they hit “See Reality”, and are shown how to correct or show off, their money reality is from their life choices.

  • Students are given the chance to budget for a girl named Gabrielle.
  • I just love this – every student receives 20 beans, as well as a game board that shows a cost (in beans) for different spending and saving categories.
  • Fortunately, there are fun and easy ways to help you improve your personal finance skills, including playing financial literacy games.
  • Your child uses a fortune teller (free printable) to determine which one of 4 Avatars they are.

Misadventures in Money Management was created by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as a money management game for teens. This game covers avoiding impulse decisions, building a sizeable savings account, and how debt can affect you. Lights, Camera, Budget is an online game that was created to help any middle school how much does a small business pay in taxes student or high school student learn financial literacy topics. In the game, the goal is to use a $100 million budget to produce a movie. Decisions must be made along the way to keep the ball rolling and not break the bank. This online game guides kids through a shopping trip with financial literacy questions along the way.

Check out the other pages on the site for budgeting and money-saving tips. Again, here’s another great, blank, Christmas budget worksheet that would work well for a child who wants to budget for Christmas presents this year. If you use a cash envelope system yourself for budgeting, then you might want to teach the same system to your kids. You could give them three choices, in the event that you have students who don’t have any money at their disposal (I’m sure this is the case, from what I’ve heard from other teachers). The chance for your students to actually hold money in their hands and make real decisions about it in the classroom is much less than it is at home. For example, Scholastic has a great set of free Shark Tank PDFs and lesson plans to use in high school classrooms.

You have to manage your finances as you prepare and expect some unexpected events as you progress in the game. In typical-Dave-Ramsey-style, the focus of this game is getting gazelle-intense to pay down that debt you’re given as a new player (each player has to pick 3 debt cards). No matter which budget planner you decide to use, take some time to tweak your approach and adjust your spending as needed until you reach your ideal budget. We believe everyone should be able to make financial decisions with confidence. Such a valuable financial lesson to learn young (especially since because young adults are least able to afford high-cost-of-living areas).