For educators and parents
Built in a classroom. Ready for yours.
Everything on this page is free: the companion guide, the standards map, the one-page plan, and four terms of course materials.
A standards-aligned overview
Built from a course that was actually taught, Mr. 401(k)’s Principles of Financial Literacy is mapped benchmark by benchmark against the National Standards for Personal Financial Education (Council for Economic Education and Jump$tart, 2021). The book addresses 38 of 40 eighth-grade and 56 of 68 twelfth-grade national standards across all six topic areas, and a published educator map shows exactly where each standard is taught, with a verbatim anchor for every claim, and says plainly what the book leaves to the classroom.
Inside the book: 47 discussion-ready prompts, 7 hands-on exercises, a chapter summary for all 18 chapters, a 211-term glossary, a chapter-by-chapter sources section citing public datasets, a nine-section business-plan capstone, and a consumer-protection appendix on credit, insurance, and scams.
Written to a tenth-grade reading ceiling, with every number shown so it can be recomputed at a whiteboard. It is a supplemental or anchor text, not a packaged curriculum: as of mid-2026, thirty states guarantee every high school student a standalone personal-finance course, and this book arrives standards-mapped for the teachers, parents, and districts those mandates create.
Downloads
- PDFTeacher and Parent Guide — chapter teaching grid, discussion prompts, activities, facilitator notes
- DOCXTeacher and Parent Guide (editable)
- PDFStandards Map for Educators — benchmark-by-benchmark alignment with verbatim anchors
- DOCXStandards Map for Educators (editable)
- PDFThe Plan on One Page — the capstone summary, small enough to copy onto an index card
The course behind the book
The full FinLit with Mr. 401(k) course is free and openly licensed (CC BY 4.0): slides and handouts from four taught terms.
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