Grades 6–8Ages 11–14 · Unit 3.1 · How Money Systems Work
The time value of patience: a free compound interest worksheet.
Sai puts in $6,000 and stops at twenty-five. Macon puts in $24,000 and keeps going to sixty-five. Most students are certain Macon wins, and being wrong about it is the point — this is the one lesson in personal finance that argues entirely against intuition.
No account. No email. Nothing collected about your child.
What is on the page
- Two savers, two timelines, one rate of return
- A prediction line to fill in before any math
- Balances at 65 and the difference between them
- An answer page with both figures worked and the compounding stated
What it teaches
- Why starting early beats contributing more
- That time, not amount, does most of the work
- Reading a long-run growth problem
How to run it
Make them write the prediction before they calculate anything. Most guess Macon because he put in four times as much. Discovering otherwise is what makes compound interest stick — being told it does not.
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Where it comes from
Unit 3.1 · How Money Systems Work of a 266-lesson curriculum.
This sheet is one activity, unchanged, from Financial Foundations™. Teachers can run a free five-week pilot with one class. Families can take the Family Edition home.