Free Personal Finance Lesson: The Credit Card That Charged 24 Percent (Self-Grading Google Form)

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What students do

Read the case. A cardholder owes $5,000 at 24 percent, pays the minimum every month, and never charges another dollar. The case file opens the statement line by line: the grace period, how an APR becomes a daily rate, why unpaid interest compounds against the borrower, and why card rates are so high in the first place.
Work the numbers. Month one: $100 of the $150 payment is interest. The Look at the Data page graphs three payoff plans for the same balance, and the student explains why a payment that shrinks every month costs more than two and a half times the interest of one held at $150.
Prove it. Eleven auto-graded questions check the ideas, then two written questions: work the minimum payment by hand, and take a side on whether a 15 percent cap on card rates would help or hurt the people it is meant to protect.

The numbers students work with

Plan for a $5,000 balance at 24%	Time to pay off	Interest paid
Minimum payment (starts at $150, then shrinks)	234 months, 19.5 years	about $8,887
Fixed $150 a month	56 months	about $3,322
Fixed $250 a month	26 months	about $1,449

What's included

Self-grading Google Form (force-copy link, so it lands in your own Drive)
The complete case file as printed in the book, with its graph and an optional Investigate It page that sends students to the Federal Reserve's own data
Printable 13-question assessment and a full answer key with model answers for the written questions
A one-page guide with pacing, grading, and standards (National Standards for Personal Financial Education; C3 economics; CCSS RH.9-10.7 and WHST.9-10.1)
Works for homeschool, co-ops, class, sub days or homework

This is case 17 of 21

The Economics and Personal Finance Workbook runs a full semester in the same format: scarcity and supply and demand, markets and labor, inflation and the Fed, taxes and trade, then a first paycheck, a budget, credit scores, a car loan, college, saving and investing, and insurance. Twenty-one case files, 200 one-page daily warm-ups, unit assessments, a semester exam, and a complete answer key.

See the workbook on Amazon