Interactive Learning Experiences

You get four raises across your career, and you have to decide how much of each raise would go to investing and how much to lifestyle increase.

Lifestyle only ever goes up, so a choice made at 28 still costs you money at 64. The chart shows two reference lines for the two extreme scenarios (every raise invested, and every raise spent on lifestyle increase), along with your own.

The result shows your portfolio, how much a year of your lifestyle costs, and how many of those years your final portfolio can buy.

The salary in the offer letter looks great, but that's never what actually gets deposited in your account. Take a paycheck apart piece by piece, and see exactly what taxes, health insurance and retirement savings take out before you see it in your bank account.

You get three numbers from a real year in the United States, with the year hidden: GDP growth, inflation and unemployment.

Figure out if it is healthy growth, overheating, recession or stagflation, then find out which year you were reading.

The hard ones are always where growth and inflation disagree!

A frost wipes out half the coffee crop. Three pizza places open on the same street. It is December 26th and the decorations are still on the shelf.

Predict whether the price goes up or down, and each answer reveals which side moved, supply or demand, and why.

Every monthly expense starts in one pile at the top.

Drag each one into Survival or Nice-to-have (editing the amounts to match your own life if you want), and two emergency fund targets grow side by side.

One is the number most people calculate from their whole budget, and the other is what survival actually costs. The gap between them is usually thousands of dollars, and it is the reason so many people give up before they even start.

You are closing on a house Thursday. You are splitting a $40 dinner bill. You are paying a deposit to a contractor you have never met.

Each situation has one clearly better answer, and the reveal names the single factor that decided it and highlights that row on the ACH vs wire transfer comparison table below.

The table stays on the page the whole time, so it works as a reference - and a cheat sheet!

Small monthly charges are easy to ignore, which is exactly why they add up without you noticing. Sort fourteen subscriptions into keep and cancel, then see what the cancelled ones end up saving you in a year.

The price you see on the windscreen at the dealership is only the beginning. Compare two cars including fuel cost, insurance, repairs and lost value, and find out which one is genuinely cheaper to own.

Pick the day and time you hit send and find out exactly when an ACH transfer actually arrives. A calendar shows which days are in the way.

Standard, next-day and Same Day ACH each behave differently. Sending at 5:01pm on the Friday of a holiday weekend is very different from sending at 9am on a Tuesday.

See how your money grows over time. Enter what you start with, what you add each month, how long you plan to invest, and the interest rate, then watch the chart build year by year.

The calculator splits your final balance into the money you put in, and the interest that piled up on top, and it tells you the exact year interest overtakes your own deposits.

For twelve months, you split money between checking and savings accounts.

Each month shows the bills you have to pay, and five of the twelve months have a bill you cannot pay. Keeping a buffer costs interest, and not keeping one costs a fee!

Ten pots of money need to be sorted into checking, savings or money market, CD, and investment. Your choices are evaluated at the end.

Two people earn the same amount, and face the same temptations all year. But one moves money to savings on payday, while the other saves whatever is left after spending. In this app, play that second person and see how far apart they finish.

Your savings arrive as a pile of chips, and three buckets are waiting: checking for bills, high yield savings for emergencies, and index funds for everything past that.

Drag the chips wherever you think they belong.

Put too little in savings and the app shows what an emergency would cost you on a credit card. Put too much and it shows the growth you gave up.

And HSA is the one account that the tax system barely touches at all: going in, growing and coming out. See how much difference that makes compared to a regular account or a 401(k).

Roth and Traditional IRAs hold the same investments and grow at the same rate, so the whole question is when you pay the tax.

Set your tax rate today and the rate you expect in retirement, and watch the two after-tax balances trade places.

A second mode runs the strictly fair version, where the Traditional saver also invests the tax refund their deduction created, and that is where the real breakeven rate appears.

Here’s a simulated brokerage order screen. You have to make four decisions: what to buy, how much to buy (in dollars or whole shares), type of order (market or limit), and then confirm.

You get an analysis of your choices after each order.

You are the stock exchange, not a trader. You tap a buyer and a seller, and they make a trade if their two numbers overlap – and the stock price changes to reflect this trade.

You play three rounds: a calm day, good news that pushes up what buyers will pay, then a rumor that scares away the buyers.

Twenty years, one decision each year: buy the index fund, or pick five stocks.

Your money is tracked against what you would have had by simply holding the index the whole way.

At the end, replay your exact strategy a thousand times with a single button click to see where your run really landed among all the ways it could have gone.

Beating the market once is luck, and the outcomes shows you why!

A comparison between an early starter and a late starter. Find out the monthly amount a late starter needs to invest to reach the same portfolio size as an early starter.

You've come into some money. Should you invest it all today, or spread it over the next year to be safe? Pick one, and see what happens over a thousand different market simulations.

Buying low and selling high sounds obvious. In this app, trade for twenty turns without knowing what comes next, and then see what rule you were really following!

Every square is one company you own through an index fund. Tap any of them to watch it go bust and see what it costs you.

Then switch to the view where you picked just three companies, tap once, and watch how much of your money disappear. Same bad news, wildly different damage!

Target date funds promise that you never have to think about asset allocation again. In this app, observe two of them closely and see what they actually hold - and how the allocation changes as retirement gets closer.

You have two mortgage offers - and the one with the lower rate charges you upfront for it in points. Find out how long you'd have to stay in the house for that to be worth paying.

Eight weeks of shopping, one thing a week, on a fixed amount of spending money. Every item can be paid for today or split into four payments.

Buy what you like. Then look at the calendar of every payment you signed up for and find out which weeks you could not actually cover.

Do you truly understand why and how your credit score changes? Make twelve months of ordinary decisions, and find out which ones actually matter and which ones have a negligible impact.

You have five debts, and some spare money each month. Which one do you attack first? Put them in your own order, and see what it costs you compared to the alternatives.

Twelve months of identical spending – one on credit (using a credit card) and one using your own money (through a debit card).

Your only decision is how much of the statement to pay each month. And just for fun, there are rewards and overdraft fees based on the choices you make!

The car dealer will happily lower your monthly payment by stretching the loan. Drag the slider and see what that actually does to the total. Also see how long you owe more than what the car is actually worth.

Deductible, copay, coinsurance, out-of-pocket maximum: the four words on an insurance card that almost everyone gets confused about! Work through a year of medical bills and guess your share of each one - and understand these terms better in the process.

A falling price and a permanent loss are not the same thing, and mixing them up is why people sell at the bottom or leave money in cash for twenty years.

Twelve situations, two buckets, and you decide which is which.

You have money left over each month and five places it could go. Drag them into the order you would fund them, and watch five years play out as the money runs down your list.

Some runs hit you with a job loss and some do not, so at the end you can replay your exact order hundreds of times and see how often it went badly.

Same money in, same investments, and the order alone can cost you thousands.

How much life insurance you need isn't a feeling, it's a calculation. Work out what your family would actually need to cover, then compare the two main types of policies.

Wondering if renters insurance is worth it? In this app, guess what it would cost to replace everything you own. Then add up your possessions one by one, and see how close you were.

Every checkout asks if you want to protect your purchase using a warranty. Say yes or no six times, then simulate those same choices a thousand times to see how they'd really work out in real life scenarios.