Have Fun Learning About Personal Finance By Playing Fidelity’s New Interactive Game

Personal finance can be pretty boring, especially for those in the millennial generation.

As a result, the savings rate in America is abysmal. Many Americans don’t have even a small emergency fund. Credit card debt is at an all-time high.

If personal finance gets taught at all to teenagers, it is part of a structured curriculum in middle school and high school. Sometimes schools will introduce investing through short-term stock-picking games instead of teaching students the principles of diversification and long-term investing.

Rather than teach personal finance in a textbook or through classes, Fidelity has turned personal finance into a game. In Fidelity’s Five Money Musts game, you take on the role of Taylor, a recent college grad, who you have to help navigate the real world of personal finance.

I encourage you to play the game yourself before reading the rest of my review, since I do have some spoilers later in the article.

How To Play The Game

Fidelity’s Five Money Musts game is not just a boring survey where there are right or wrong answers. You make decisions for Taylor as he/she goes through a monthly budget, and at the end of the game, Fidelity awards you points based on five categories. They also give you bonus points based on how happy Taylor is at the end of the game. This ensures that you don’t just refuse to let Taylor go out with friends or splurge on some new clothes.

Your first step is to pick a job offer with different levels of salary and benefits. You then go through a typical month, paying essential expenses, contributing to a 401(k), and deciding whether or not to splurge on different needs and desires that come up during the month. With each decision, your available money goes down, and Taylor’s happiness meter rises and falls based on your decisions to scrimp or splurge. At the end of the game, Fidelity scores your decisions based on five categories: Budget, Credit, Debt, Investing, and Retirement. You also get bonus points for Taylor’s level of happiness at the end of the game.

My Best Answers To Fidelity’s Five Money Musts Game

[Spoiler Alert: Below I discuss the choices I used (after playing several times) to maximize my final score. I encourage you to play the game yourself before reading below.]

Question 1: Which Job Offer To Choose

You have the option to choose between these three jobs with different salaries and benefits. The best option is to take the higher salary, because Taylor is single and healthy. While the match is attractive, the extra salary could be used to increase your retirement savings by even more than the match.

Question 2: Choosing a Place To Live

I chose the middle-road option, allowing for a moderate commute and only one roommate. Remember that it’s important to keep Taylor happy and not just choose the cheapest option.

Question 3: Essential Expenses

Fidelity recommends that half of your post-tax income should go to essential expenses. They give you many options for essential expenses. This teaches young people the components of a budget, including things they might not remember such as utilities.

It turns out that the game rewards you for spending as close to 50% of your post-tax income on essential expenses as possible. As a result, even though I personally do not have cable TV, I included this in my “essential expenses.”

Question 4: 401K signup

Of course, you should sign up for a 401(k), and they encourage you to save at least 15% of your income for retirement. You get the maximum points for retirement savings even if you save more — but if you save too much, then you won’t have enough money to splurge later, which will hurt Taylor’s happiness score.

Question 5: Credit Card

Dave Ramsey will disagree with this question, but you will lose a lot of points if you do not sign up for a credit card. The game offers generous cashback rewards, and it will test your ability to responsibly use credit in future questions.

Question 6: Splurges

Many of the remaining questions offer Taylor opportunities to splurge on various items, including eating out, buying a guitar, buying new furniture, attending a concert, buying a new wardrobe, and going out on a weekend trip with friends. To maximize your score, you need to stay within your budget, while splurging as much as possible in order to keep Taylor’s happiness meter high.

If you opened a credit card, they will give you the option to use your credit card. However, if you exceed 30% utilization of your credit line, you will lose points for poor credit utilization.

Question 7: Windfall Management

Taylor receives a $1,000 windfall in graduation checks, and you can choose to pay down student loans at 3% interest, invest the money at 7%, or spend it. In this question, I choose to invest the windfall, which is the optimal answer from a mathematical perspective but possibly not a psychological perspective.

Question 8: Emergency Fund

The optimal answer is to save 5% of your income for an emergency fund, which fits into their 50% essentials / 15% retirement / 5% spending rule.

Question 9: Payoff Credit Card

Obviously the optimal answer is to pay the credit card in full. However, if you’ve spent more on your credit card than you have left in your paycheck, then you’ll get dinged for not being able to pay in full.

Results

At the end of the game, They show you your final score, with a possible 3,000 points available for each of the major five categories: budget, credit, debt, investment, and retirement. They give you opportunities to learn more about basic principles of personal finance during the debriefing. You also get bonus points for how happy you made Taylor through your splurges.

After many tries, I was able to get a score of 17,480 and was deemed a Money Master by Fidelity. There are probably opportunities to get additional points — post your score in the comments below!

Takeaways

The 50%/15%/5% Rule For Budgeting

I had not heard of the 50%/15%/5% rule for budgeting until playing this game, but I think it’s a great rule of thumb for young investors. Note that these numbers are based on after-tax income. By spending 50% for essentials, and 20% for savings (15% retirement + 5% emergency fund), it leaves 30% of your money for available.

This is actually similar to the 50/30/20 balanced money formula proposed by Elizabeth Warren (yes, that Elizabeth Warren), and Amelia Warren Tyagi in All Your Money: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, which I had heard about from J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly.

Saving 15-20% of after-tax pay is slightly lower than what I would recommend for physicians, but because an individual who will be making $50,000-$60,000 for their lifetime will likely rely more on Social Security than a high-income professional, this is reasonable. 15-20% of after-tax income is obviously too low for someone who wants to retire early.

Credit cards are good, if you use them wisely

While Dave Ramsey would disapprove of Fidelity incentivizing young people to put expenses on their credit card, Fidelity does emphasize responsible use of credit in their game. You get heavily penalized if you do not pay off the credit card in full each month. You are also penalized if you utilize more than 30% of your available credit. In real life, I would just get more credit cards so that I can put all possible charges on a credit card to earn cash back and still be under 30% credit utilization.

It’s important to enjoy life, not just save as much money as possible

By incentivizing Taylor’s happiness through bonus points, Fidelity emphasizes that personal finance isn’t just about saving as much as possible, but also splurging wisely so that you’re having fun in your 20s, even while saving for your financial future.

Conclusion

I think this game is a fantastic way to teach young people in their 20s how to save. While it may not be fully applicable to attending physicians and high-income professionals, I think the game is very applicable to resident physicians. Since the game can be played in less than 15 minutes, it is an excellent way to teach new college and medical school graduates about basic personal finance principles. Please share the game with anyone you think might benefit from it.

What do you think? What was your score? Do you disagree with any of the principles that Fidelity is trying to teach with this game?