Back in 2017, NGPF Co-founder Jessica spent a lot of time creating a whole suite of spreadsheet tutorial videos on YouTube, pretty sure she was going to go viral at any moment. That did not happen. As a much better alternative, let us recommend instead Financial Algebra Unit 4, which is titled Budgeting & Systems of Equations, but which actually includes quite a bit of spreadsheet practice! 

What's Going On with Smoothie Star? 

Before you even get to spreadsheets, students learn three separate Budgeting Strategies in Lesson 4.3 -- a Zero-based Budget, the Envelope Method, and a 50/30/20 Budget (nice percents refresher, too). Every personal finance themed lesson in the Financial Algebra course ends with a "Math Connection," which is a chance to apply some math to the personal finance you've just learned. In this Math Connection, students find out their friend is spending quite a fortune at Smoothie Star and use their bank statements to help create a budget using one of the 3 strategies. It's not mandatory that they use a spreadsheet here, but they could! 

If you're looking for something else fun around budgeting strategies, did you know TikTok stars recently rebranded the Envelope Method as Cash Stuffing? Yanely covers it in a popular FinCap Friday!

Raffi & Lily's Receipts

Lesson 4.4 - Budgeting Tools is where the real spreadsheet fun starts. Because teens love apps, we start with a review of budgeting apps like You Need a Budget, Mint, and Personal Capital. Then, in case your students are spreadsheet novices, we've included a how-to video created in-house by NGPF so that it perfectly aligns to the budgeting spreadsheets we're asking students to create. 

Every math themed lesson in the Financial Algebra course ends with a "Math Application," which is a problem set with three levels of difficulty. In this Application, students can choose (or you can assign) a level that fits their spreadsheet savviness. In the earlier levels, they fill in missing information from a pre-made budget, while in Level 3 they build the budget from scratch. 

Random Occupation Picker   

In the final lesson of the unit, 4.9 - Complete a Budget the discussion prompt to kick things off is the thought provoking: 

• Would you prefer a job with a variable weekly income but the potential to earn a higher salary based on your performance OR would you prefer a consistently weekly paycheck but without as much earning potential?  Explain your preference.

Students calculate averages, distinguish between salary and wage work, and then create a zero-based budget using a spreadsheet. This time, rather than the whole class following one set of prompts, each student designs their own life using a fun wheel of occupations.

The rest of the lesson rolls out more like a project, in that they're using their occupation's average salary (and a few more wheel spins for other factors) to set up a budget that will work best for them. It's fun, it's real life, and it pushes their newly developed spreadsheet skills. 

Do your students enjoy using spreadsheets? Do they already know how? Could they use more practice? The NGPF Financial Algebra course has a number of spreadsheet lessons sprinkled throughout, and it's an area where we're hoping to build even more content going forward. Find them all on the Activities page, using the filter.

And then, tell us what else you need when it comes to spreadsheets! 

About the Author

Jessica Endlich

When I started working at Next Gen Personal Finance, it's as though my undergraduate degree in finance, followed by ten years as an educator in an NYC public high school, suddenly all made sense.