Helping Teens Create a Budget

October’s National Financial Planning Month is a great time to help teens learn the fundamentals of budget planning. Creating, and living within, a budget is an essential adult living skill that will allow young adults, especially those with special needs, to be successful in life.

Try a Free Lesson

“Creating a Budget” from Daily Living Skills’ workbook Paying Bills is a good way to set out the fundamentals of creating a budget. This free lesson offers the basics in budgeting by laying out the percentages students should pay for each of the major categories of expense associated with living independently.

Create Discussions

Financial experts recommend that people spend no more than 30% of their after-tax income on housing. Yet, according to the Business Insider*, the average American spends 37% of their income on house—and more, if they’re young or living in urban areas.

Let this information open up a class discussion on ways to mitigate this trend. What can students do in the short-term to lower their housing costs? Stay at home? Move to a cheaper area? Live with a roommate? Create a group home arrangement? Or, what can they do to help in the future? Elect representatives who endorse affordable housing? Write to representatives? Join city councils?

Doing the Math

Let students see the real-money cost of housing by looking at the classifieds. Find ads for several houses or apartments in your neighborhood. Use this formula to determine how much they’d need to earn monthly to afford the housing and stay within the 30% budget.

Cost of housing = 30

X 100

Cross multiply to get: (Cost of housing X 100) = X times 30
Divide the answer of x(30) into the Cost of housing X100
That answer will be the gross income you need to make to afford the house
Compare this income to the average income students might expect to make at a first job.

For More Information

“Creating a Budget” comes from Daily Living Skills’ workbook Paying Bills. Like other books in the series, it's written on a 3rd/4th grade level and include grading sheets, answer keys and parent information letters to comply with federal standards for transition skills. The Teacher’s Manual (sold separately) provides information on program set-up and maintenance along with pre/post-assessments, written ITP (Individual Transition Plan) goals for each book, and parent/student interest inventories.