For Teachers · 2026–27 School Year
Your students live a full financial life — first job to retirement — making the decisions your lessons describe, and living with what those decisions do twenty years later.
Free for every teacher and every student. No seat limits, no purchase order, no quote request.
Takes about a minute. You are signed in immediately — nothing to approve, nobody to wait for.
Not a waitlist, not an application, and not a pilot you pay for — there is nothing to be accepted into. Make an account and you are already using it. FiscalPath is built and working; what it has not had is enough contact with real classrooms, so if you teach personal finance, economics, business or a life-skills course, I would like to build the next year of this around what actually happens when you put it in front of thirty students.
Set up on your own in minutes, or ask and I will walk your class through it. A real person answers either way.
Tell me the unit you are teaching and I will help build the scenario that goes with it.
Most of what shipped this year came from someone saying "my students got stuck here."
Pedagogy
The design choices below are deliberate, and they are the reason FiscalPath produces arguments in a classroom rather than clicking.
The health insurance screen shows four numbers and how many doctor visits a typical year holds at their age. It shows no expected annual cost and recommends no plan — because working out what each plan would cost is the exercise, and choosing between them is the judgment. The retirement screen does the same: it computes what a Roth conversion costs in tax and in lost health subsidies, then names no winner.
Roth versus Traditional comes out a genuine wash when the tax bracket now matches the bracket later — each one wins when the gap points its way. Neither health plan wins the worst year. Repairing beats replacing on some cars and not others. Because the numbers are real, the right answer really does depend on the situation, so a student cannot pattern-match their way through.
A run covers ages 22 to 85. Skipping maintenance at 30 is a failed furnace at 38. Not converting to a Roth in a low-income year at 60 is a forced withdrawal at 75. Students feel the shape of a decision that does not pay off or punish immediately — which is most real financial decisions, and the hardest thing to teach from a worksheet.
Health insurance genuinely loses money in a typical year — that is why people skip it, and a simulation that hid it would teach students to distrust the lesson. Going without looks rational right up until the year it is not. The 4% retirement rule fails about a fifth of the time. Students meet the real trade-off, not a sanitised one.
Hours are as scarce as dollars. A second job pays more and costs the evenings that made the week bearable; a cheaper apartment forty minutes out costs four hours a week in the car. Students who optimise purely for money watch their wellbeing fall, and have to work out why.
2026 federal brackets, the actual IRS contribution limits, real Social Security bend points, the real ACA subsidy cliff, and Michigan's own retirement subtraction. Every figure is kept in one place with the year it belongs to, so what a student learns transfers to the form they will actually fill in.
Custom scenarios
A scenario is a starting situation plus the things that happen to it. You set who the student is, what they own, what they owe, and what goes wrong — so the simulation lands on the exact thing you taught on Tuesday.
Teaching emergency funds? Put a student in a nine-year-old truck with a failing transmission and $400 in savings, then break it in month seven. Teaching insurance? Start them uninsured at 28 and schedule the diagnosis. The bill is priced through whatever coverage they chose, so the lesson is their decision rather than your slide.
Build them yourself, or ask for a hand. The builder is yours the moment you sign up. If you would rather not start from a blank screen, send me the unit you are teaching and I will draft the first one for you to edit.
"The transmission just went. What would you have had to give up over the last six months to be ready for this?"
An example scenario, as students see it
Running a class
Students create their own account, type a six-character code, and they are in. No roster to prepare, no accounts for you to make, and no cap on how many join.
Starting conditions, career, housing, vehicle, health and retirement history — plus scheduled events that break exactly what you want, when you want.
Over a hundred things to grade against — net worth, savings rate, whether they kept insurance, how much of their retirement they could actually reach before 59½.
Written prompts that fire at a moment you choose — after a crash, at a job offer, when the emergency fund empties. Their answers come back to you to read.
Publish what you build, and copy what other teachers have published. A scenario that worked in someone else's third period is a starting point for yours.
Assign a scenario with a due date, see who has finished, and read every written answer in one place rather than thirty browser tabs.
Every classroom tool, for every teacher and every student, with no seat limits and no per-student cost. FiscalPath exists because financial literacy should not sit behind a purchase order. If you want to support the work there is a donation link, and that is the whole business model.
A single year of simulated life runs in about 20–30 minutes of class time. A full run to retirement can be played a year at a time across a semester, or compressed — students can switch to deciding a whole year at once, which trades away the ability to react mid-year.
Only to join a course and submit work. The simulator itself runs with no sign-up at all, so you can put it on the projector or let students try it before anyone registers.
A browser. It runs on Chromebooks, school desktops, iPads and phones — nothing to install and nothing for your IT department to approve.
The tax and housing figures are modelled on Michigan, and federal content — brackets, IRAs, Social Security, health insurance — applies everywhere. Teachers outside Michigan use it happily; the state layer is one line on a tax return rather than the substance of the lesson. Broader state support is on the roadmap.
Not yet — it is on the roadmap. For now the join code is the workflow, and it takes about as long as posting a link.
One person, building it because financial literacy tools are either expensive, shallow, or both. That is why you get a real reply when you email, and why beta feedback turns into shipped features rather than a ticket number.
Make an account, build a course, hand out the join code. If it is not useful you have lost ten minutes, and if it is I would very much like to hear how it went.