'Budget' photo (c) 2012, Tax Credits - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

This short “The Best…” list is sort of an addendum to The Best Sites For Learning Economics & Practical Money Skills. Even though there are some great financial literacy sites on that list, there really isn’t anything there that students can use to create a budget for themselves — either reflective of their present income and expenses or what they anticipate for the future.

There are tons of online budgeting tools, but most, I think, are not particularly accessible to English Language Learners. As with all of my “The Best…” lists, though, I will only include online applications that I think will be accessible to ELL’s (and are free to use).

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Students To Create Budgets:

Career Zone California has revised their exceptional online student budget calculator.

(There’s now a site that will provide you with a localized budget of what you need to live in any city or town in the United States.  It’s called The Living Wage Calculator, and has been developed by people at Pennsylvania State University.)

Numbeo shows the cost-of-living in just about every country in the world, and many cities in the United States.

Pear Budget is good for students who don’t live in California. It, too, has a step-by-step guide. However, it doesn’t have the information needed for students to realistically develop their budget — they would have to research the specifics elsewhere. But the site is very clear what budget categories students would need to use, and it’s very clear how to input the information. You can use the site without saving the information for free, and then you can get a free thirty-day trial before you have to start paying for it. But you can just have students complete it and print it out without doing any sign-up at all.

Finally, Practical Money Skills For Life has a variety of simple and reasonably accessible calculators for a variety of financial issues.

As usual, feedback and additional suggestions are always welcome.

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