How to teach teen financial literacy that sticks: I built a new course and need honest testers
Last month, I stood in the slow self-checkout line at our local grocery store behind my 16-year-old, who was buying after-school chips and a new video game skin with his first paycheck from the community pool. He swiped his debit card, got a decline, and stared at the screen like it had personally insulted him. “I had $120 in there three days ago,” he said, loud enough for the person behind us to glance over. I counted it out mentally: $40 gas for the shared car, $25 for fast food with friends, $15 for another skin the week before, $30 for pop concert tickets. Yeah, that added up to zero. He’d memorized the difference between simple and compound interest for his high school personal finance quiz two days earlier, but he couldn’t tell me where his money had gone.
I taught high school for 12 years before stepping back to stay home with my younger kid, and I saw this pattern play out over and over. Kids can ace the multiple-choice tests on financial terms, but they have no practice handling the small, daily money choices that actually add up to big habits. The standard curriculum I saw was always focused on problems teens won’t face for 20 or 30 years: mortgages, retirement accounts, long-term investing. No one talks about the stuff they deal with right now: how to spot invisible spending that drains your checking account, what to say when your friends pressure you to spend more than you can afford, or what to do if you accidentally get an overdraft fee.
I started jotting down lesson ideas a few years ago, after talking to other parents and former colleagues who all said the same thing: nothing out there meets kids where they are. One neighbor told me her 18-year-old left for college last fall and racked up a $1,200 credit card bill in the first semester from daily DoorDash orders. A teacher friend at my old high school said their entire required financial literacy unit is one pre-recorded video and a 10-question quiz that most kids finish in 10 minutes. So I started building my own course, tailored to 13- to 18-year-olds, focused on the money problems they actually face right now.
It’s four weeks long, with 20-minute lessons that fit into a busy teen’s schedule, no 2-hour homework assignments. The first lesson walks them through a 7-day spending log, no fancy budget apps required—just a notes app or a piece of paper to write down every single purchase, no matter how small. I tested this with my son after the grocery store incident, and at the end of the week he realized he was spending $90 a month on energy drinks and small tips for his favorite Twitch streamers. He’d had no idea that $3 here and $5 there added up that fast. The second lesson is full of actual scripts teens can use for peer pressure around money, like “I’m skipping dinner out this week, I’m saving for the fall festival, can we just get ice cream instead?” No one teaches that, but it’s one of the top reasons teens overspend. The third lesson breaks down how debit and credit cards actually work for people under 21, including how overdraft fees work and how to fix them if you get hit with one. The fourth lesson walks through how to save for a short-term goal (a new phone, concert tickets, a skateboard) without feeling like you have to give up every small fun thing to get there.
Even if you don’t test the course, there’s one small thing you can try with your teen this week that makes a bigger difference than any lecture. Ask them to track every purchase for seven days, no strings attached. Tell them upfront you’re not going to yell or judge no matter what they spend money on. At the end of the week, sit down for 10 minutes and just ask two questions: Which purchases made you really happy? Which ones do you not even remember buying? That’s it. No lecture about cutting back, no new rules. Just let them see the pattern for themselves. That’s the thing I learned teaching: kids don’t change their habits because you tell them what to do. They change when they notice something on their own.
I’m almost done with the first full draft of the course now, and I don’t want to just polish it up and release it without getting real, honest feedback from real people. That’s why I’m looking for testers. I don’t want people to sugarcoat it. If a lesson is boring, if a worksheet doesn’t make sense, if something is missing that your kid or your students need, I want to hear that. I’m looking for parents of teens 13 to 18, or teachers who work with that age group, to test it out. It doesn’t matter if your kid already has a part-time job and knows a little about money, or if they’ve never handled their own cash at all—I need all kinds of input. All testers get the full course, all videos, worksheets and guides, completely for free. All I ask is that you fill out a 10-minute survey at the end, and if you’re open to it, have a quick 15-minute chat to tell me what worked and what didn’t.
I don’t think this course will fix every money mistake a teen will make. My son still overdrew his account again two weeks after we did the spending log together. Mistakes are part of learning, and that’s okay. The point is to give them practice with small, low-stakes mistakes now, when they’re still living at home, before they’re handling rent and student loan bills on their own. Right now, this is just a work in progress. I built it based on what I saw in my classroom and what I’ve experienced with my own kids, but I know I’m missing things. If you’re interested in testing it out, just leave a comment below or reach out through the contact form on this site. I’m looking forward to hearing what you think.
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