Middle & High School Consumer Math Budget Project

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a budget project where students mix and match a career, apartment, car and habit to see if their spending falls within given budget guidelines. Will students stay within budget with their choices?

I intended this to be a high school math project, but teachers have mentioned it also working for middle school students. The math is all based on percentages, so if your students have already learned how to calculate percentages, the project should work for them, even if they are not yet in high school.

Students pick a career (6 choices), a car (4 choices), a home (4 choices) and a habit (6 choices), and calculate their net monthly income using the 70% approximation. 

Why use 70% to estimate net income? This is an approximation of net income from gross income that we learn in our consumer math curriculum when all deductions are not known. 

The approximation is helpful when deciding to accept a job offer, if car payments will fall within transportation budget, or if an apartment is affordable. It's also a nice workaround to estimate net monthly income for those 2 vs. 3 paycheck months when paid biweekly, or those 4 vs 5 paycheck months when paid weekly.

After choosing their 4 cards, students walk through a 7-page packet calculating costs and analyzing budgets. Will they be in budget in each category or over?

There are 576 possible career/home/car/habit combinations! I included 2 sample answer keys-- one for a budget-friendly lifestyle and one for the most expensive lifestyle. Which will your students choose?

The project can be found here: Budget Project

It has also been added to the consumer math curriculum's budgets folder. 

Budget Project