Grade 9 · printable course

Personal Finance: Decisions with Money

Grade 9 · 389 pages · 47 lessons · PDF, print at home

A one-semester-equivalent (90-day) personal finance course for a single homeschool student working through an adaptive learning app with parent guidance. Students build a connected model of how income, spending, credit, risk, and long-term investing interact over a lifetime, using their own (hypothetical or real, parent's choice) numbers throughout. The course moves from the concrete (a single paycheck and a single budget) toward the abstract: compounding, risk-adjusted return, and the tradeoffs behind insurance and credit contracts. Every unit ends with a decision the student must justify in writing, not just a worksheet they can complete by pattern-matching. Because the app can auto-grade factual and procedural items, the parent's time is concentrated on the written justifications and the delayed, cumulative checks the app does not generate on its own.

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$21.99

one household licence

What is inside

Every unit and lesson in this book, in order. The same lessons are taught online at lettersanddevotion.com, so a family can move between paper and screen.

Personal Finance: Decisions with Money

47 lessons · try a lesson online free

Unit 1: Income: What You Actually Have to Work With10 lessons
  1. 1.The structure of a pay stub (gross pay, itemized deductions, net pay)
  2. 2.The causal relationship between gross pay and net pay via withholding and FICA
  3. 3.The gross-to-net pay calculation procedure
  4. 4.Hourly vs. salary vs. commission/tips as income structures with different variability
  5. 5.The effect of pay frequency on cash flow timing versus total income
  6. 6.Net-income comparison across two full job offers
  7. 7.Opportunity cost as applied to competing job offers
  8. 8.Fit between an income structure's characteristics and an untaught personal circumstance
  9. 9.A written net-pay comparison and conditional recommendation between two job offers
  10. 10.The validity of using gross salary alone as the deciding factor between job offers
Unit 2: Budgeting: Assigning Every Dollar a Job8 lessons
  1. 11.Fixed vs. variable expenses
  2. 12.The contestable boundary between needs and wants
  3. 13.The 50/30/20 budgeting heuristic
  4. 14.Limits of the 50/30/20 heuristic under atypical fixed-cost burdens
  5. 15.Emergency fund sizing and liquidity
  6. 16.Variance between planned and actual spending
  7. 17.Opportunity cost and reallocation under an unplanned expense
  8. 18.The limits of a purely numeric budget comparison
Unit 3: Growth: How Money Changes Over Time10 lessons
  1. 19.The distinction between simple interest and compound interest as calculation methods
  2. 20.Simple interest and compound interest formulas applied to a principal, rate, and time
  3. 21.The mechanism by which compound interest accelerates over time
  4. 22.The Rule of 72 as an estimation tool and the boundary conditions of its accuracy
  5. 23.The relative effect of time versus contribution amount on ending balance under compound growth
  6. 24.The shared deep structure between compound savings growth and compound debt growth, applied without a surface cue
  7. 25.The effect of volatility and sequence on compounded returns despite equal average return
  8. 26.Diversification as a strategy for reducing exposure to any single asset's failure
  9. 27.The application of the student's own budget savings figure as the input to a personal long-horizon compound-growth projection
  10. 28.The abstract structural distinction between additive (fixed-base) growth and multiplicative (growing-base) growth, independent of a financial surface context
Unit 4: Credit and Risk: Borrowing and Insuring9 lessons
  1. 29.APR applied monthly to a revolving credit card balance under minimum payments
  2. 30.Accelerated payoff schedule versus minimum-payment schedule for a fixed credit balance
  3. 31.The mechanism by which minimum payments extend cost (compounding against a nearly-static principal)
  4. 32.Behaviors that build a credit score versus behaviors that damage it
  5. 33.The relationship between credit score range and offered APR
  6. 34.Secured versus unsecured debt, defined by collateral
  7. 35.Risk pooling as the mechanism that makes insurance rational despite most individuals not collecting
  8. 36.Insurance decisions for a novel household scenario, justified by premium/deductible/policy-limit/self-insure tradeoffs
  9. 37.The adequacy of 'what if' reasoning versus risk-pooling reasoning as justification for an insurance decision
Unit 5: The Household Plan: Integrating the Parts10 lessons
  1. 38.Net worth as assets minus liabilities
  2. 39.The relationship between expense variability, liquidity, and emergency-fund sizing
  3. 40.Opportunity cost of funding-order choices under a fixed monthly surplus
  4. 41.Funding order (emergency fund, high-interest debt, investing, insurance) under a novel household constraint
  5. 42.Interaction effects among budget, emergency fund, and debt sections of a household plan
  6. 43.The argued funding order and its counterfactual (reversed order) consequences within the student's own household plan
  7. 44.The structural difference between an integrated plan and a topic-by-topic plan
  8. 45.Generalizability of the standard funding-order heuristic across differing household profiles
  9. 46.Core vocabulary from Units 2-4 (emergency fund, high-interest debt, risk pooling) and this unit (net worth)
  10. 47.Funding-order integration as a durable, transferable construct (this unit's core learning target)

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