I taught middle and high school math for many years, and I always offered financial-focused projects as an option for students. I also used financial examples o

I taught middle and high school math for many years, and I always offered financial-focused projects as an option for students. I also used financial examples on a regular basis, just to keep a healthy, rational conversation about financial literacy going. The two most important topics over the years seemed to be loan analysis and understanding taxes. To understand loans, I taught students how to determine the monthly payment for a loan using a blank spreadsheet. For students who were intimidated by spreadsheets, we'd start the process on a whiteboard. Just a simple spreadsheet with columns like month, current principal, payment, towards interest, towards principal, new principal. Then guess-and-check to see what the payment needed to be in order to pay off the loan in a specified time period. That was great, because it let everyone see how loan payments are calculated in the first place. Then it let curious students explore the impact of paying above the minimum, making lump sum payments at various intervals, different interest rates, initial no-payment periods, and other loan "features". We also looked at cumulative interest and other long-term aspects of a loan. Students could do their own projects about car loans, home loans, business loans, and more. Every time I've taken out a loan in my life, I've done this myself, and it's made the experience better every time. Just doing this once lets you talk to a loan officer on a much more eye-to-eye level. This is education as consumer advocacy, fighting back against predatory practices one class at a time. For taxes, I just had students either bring in their own pay stubs or W2s, or work with a sample set related to a field they were interested in working in. Then I had them fill out a 1040 by hand. They had to start out with the simplest 1040, and they could choose to try a more complex version after that. I had them repeat the process for several income levels; most students had no idea what a "tax bracket" actually is. I'd start with a question like "You're making $__k/yr, and you're offered a $1k raise. The raise will bump you into the next tax bracket. Should you accept the raise?" Many students said no, because they had no concept of incremental tax rates. You have to present this material carefully. If you tell a whole class of math students, "Okay, everyone's learning to analyze loans this week!" they'll hate it. If you say, "We're learning to analyze numerical patterns, and one of the patterns you can analyze is how banks determine the monthly payment for the car or house loan you might want in a few years", they'll jump on it.