Meet the students behind Moneyling’s high school program—Beatriz, Tony, Cari, Marquis, Amelia, and Richie, alongside their teacher, Mr. Morris. Each character brings a different perspective to financial literacy, shaped by real-life situations students recognize. Tony explores gig work and independence, sometimes learning the hard way about organization and taxes. Beatriz tends to think ahead, weighing long-term goals and planning carefully. Cari navigates choices around spending and priorities, while Marquis considers risk and opportunity. Amelia reflects thoughtful decision-making in everyday money moments, and Richie often brings energy and impulse into the mix—sparking important conversations.
Why teach financial literacy through characters?
What makes this approach powerful is context. Students aren’t just memorizing terms like “budget” or “credit”—they’re seeing how decisions play out in relatable scenarios. Story-based learning lowers the stakes, making it easier for students to engage, reflect, and discuss without fear of being wrong. It mirrors how real life works: messy, human, and full of choices.
When students learn through story, they don’t just understand financial concepts—they remember them, question them, and begin to apply them.
What does each Moneyling™ character help students talk about?
Each character gives the class a safe stand-in for a money topic, so students can discuss a decision without talking about their own family. Across the NS-12 courses, the storylines line up roughly as follows.
Cari carries the save-versus-spend tension: she has a part-time job and keeps deciding whether her pay goes into savings or walks out the door, and her story also leads into credit scores. Richie is the student who moves fast; his storyline in Managing Credit follows an auto loan and the gap between the monthly payment and what the car really costs.
Amelia thinks about timelines and side income, which makes her the natural guide when students read student-loan disclosures or sketch a small business idea. Beatriz plans carefully and carries family money responsibilities; her storyline covers credit reports, disputes and fraud, including how to verify a message that asks for money.
Marquis feels the pull of peer pressure around money and weighs risky shortcuts, including alternative financial services, which makes him a good anchor for conversations about pushing back. Tony, introduced above, brings gig work and the organization and tax lessons that come with it. Students also meet Mallory in the Managing Credit course, where her buy now, pay later plans stack up faster than she expects.
How do I use the characters in a single class period?
Pick one character and one decision per period rather than trying to cover the whole cast. For example, a 45-minute period could open with five minutes on Richie at a car lot hearing a monthly payment of $280 (a fictional figure), followed by ten minutes of discussion about what that number leaves out.
Students then spend about twenty-five minutes on a worksheet: if the loan runs 60 months at $280, what does Richie pay in total ($16,800 in this illustrative example), and how does that compare with a $14,000 sticker price? Close with a five-minute exit ticket asking for one question Richie should ask before he signs.
Characters also make it easier to come back to a topic later. When Mallory or Cari shows up again in a later unit, students remember the earlier decision, and you spend less time rebuilding context.
What if students say the characters aren’t like them?
A student saying a character doesn’t sound like them is a useful reaction, not a problem. Ask what the character would do differently with a different job, a different town or different family responsibilities, and have students rewrite one decision. The rewrite often shows more understanding than the original worksheet.
Avoid assigning characters to students (“you’re the Richie of this class”). Let students choose whose decision they want to defend, and never ask them to compare a character’s money situation with their own household’s.
Where do the characters not do the work for you?
Characters introduce a decision; they don’t replace the math or the vocabulary. Plan to pause the story and define terms such as principal or interest when they come up, and use the course worksheets for calculation practice.
Stories also only work when students know the scene. On a short or disrupted week, read the key passage aloud together instead of assigning it as homework, so students who were absent or behind can still join the discussion.
👉 Explore the Moneyling High School Program: https://www.moneyling.org/for-educators#high-school-offerings