Personal Finance & Investment Strategy

• Model how compound interest changes long-term outcomes

• Compare stocks, bonds, commodities, and major exchanges

• Develop a monthly budget from a researched career salary

• Plan savings, an emergency fund, credit, and debt management

• Test investment choices using simulated money

• Create and present a comprehensive personal financial plan

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Explain how budgeting, credit, debt, saving, and investing connect

• Evaluate financial choices using goals, time horizon, and relevant tradeoffs

• Develop a realistic long-term personal financial plan

Students leave with a completed financial plan and stronger tools for making informed decisions about income, spending, credit, saving, investing, and entrepreneurship.

Financial literacy helps students connect income and spending with goals rather than treating each decision in isolation. Budgeting, credit, compounding, and investing all unfold over time, so assumptions and habits can matter as much as a single transaction.

A comprehensive plan makes those relationships visible. Students test whether projected expenses fit income, how an emergency fund changes flexibility, and how financial choices reflect priorities. These skills support personal independence, entrepreneurship, business study, and responsible long-term planning. Together, these skills strengthen careful reasoning, responsible professional judgment, and the ability to revise a conclusion when new evidence changes the picture.

This course is for high school students who have completed 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th grade and want to understand personal finance, investing, credit, budgeting, or entrepreneurship. It fits students who want practical tools they can connect to future goals.

Participants should be ready to work with realistic income and expense assumptions, compare choices, use basic calculations, and explain a long-term plan. Careful thinking and willingness to revise assumptions will be valuable. Success depends on careful preparation, steady participation, and respect for classmates’ perspectives throughout the course.

Based on students surveyed in Summer Discovery’s 2026 program at the University of Michigan.

Programs on the University of Michigan campus give high-school students the experience of exploring an academic interest in Ann Arbor, a college town where campus and community life blend together. Tree-lined streets, downtown bookstores and cafés, the Nichols Arboretum, and trails near the Huron River create different ways to experience the setting beyond class.

Students learn alongside peers, navigate a large and active campus, and gain independence through everyday choices in a new environment. The experience helps students understand what university life can feel like while giving them space to deepen an interest without having every next step decided. For families, the program offers a meaningful combination of academic depth, community, personal growth, and clearer direction about what a student may want to study or pursue next.

Financial planners, analysts, bankers, accountants, entrepreneurs, and corporate-finance teams evaluate cash flow, goals, credit, investments, and financial tradeoffs. They build plans and explain how assumptions affect possible outcomes.

Students practice those tasks through budgeting, credit analysis, investment simulations, capital-management topics, and a personal financial plan. The course provides a foundation for finance, accounting, economics, entrepreneurship, banking, and business analytics. The work also shows how specialists collaborate across roles and communicate important evidence-based decisions to colleagues, clients, organizations, or the public in complex professional settings.