Budgeting Lesson Plan

Teacher prep work: You will need to look into the cost of the local rental market as well as the costs for various utilities so you will know how much to assign to your students as a monthly income rate.

Materials needed:

You will not teed to provide any materials for this lesson. Your students will be responsible for providing their own materials, such as rental ads.

Lesson Plan

You will need to explain to your students that you are assigning them a budgeting exercise. You will be giving them a monthly income limit and that with that they are to look through local newspapers and internet ads to find apartments within that monthly income limit. They must also take into account that they will also need to be able to pay bills and have spending money with that income limit.

Tell students that the bills that they section out must include gas and electric, water and garbage if required by their picked housing, food for the month, gas money for the month, general spending money and a savings and emergency funds.

Make sure to instruct your students to talk to their parents and family friends to find out a realistic idea of the amount of money spent on gas and electric, food and water and garbage if applicable. Have them keep in mind that the numbers might be lower since their budget would be for one person as opposed to the family budget figures that they might be receiving and that they’ll need to adjust for this.

Grades will be based on accuracy, practicality and how well they managed to balance their budget.

Your students will not need to take initial deposit money for a rental into consideration.