Most people did not learn money math in school. They learned it later — the hard way, on a payslip that made no sense, a credit-card bill that kept growing, or a savings account that never quite caught up to inflation. The Money Math Workout was written to fill that gap: the arithmetic behind paychecks, budgets, interest, debt, spending, taxes, and the everyday financial decisions nobody sat you down and explained.
Every problem is drawn from a situation you have actually been in. Every answer is included. No jargon, no financial-advice tone, no assumptions about what you already know. Just the plain arithmetic — taught the way you would actually use it.
What's inside — 7 chapters plus a closing capstone, 449+ practice problems, every answer worked:
- Your Paycheck & Earnings — hourly to salary, overtime, deductions, and what a raise really means
- Budgeting That Actually Works — the 50/30/20 rule, fixed vs variable expenses, monthly-to-annual math
- Saving & Compound Interest — simple vs compound, the Rule of 72, APY, and why starting early beats saving big
- Borrowing & Debt — APR, minimum-payment traps, loan payments, and the avalanche vs snowball math
- Smart Spending — unit price, cost per use, coupon percentages, subscriptions, and the break-even question
- Taxes Without the Panic — marginal brackets, effective rate, standard deduction, sales tax, and property tax
- Financial Decisions & Data — break-even points, ROI, reading bank statements, opportunity cost, and sunk cost
- One Payday, Every Skill — a closing capstone chapter that chains every skill into one running story, with a full walkthrough
Five ways to practise each idea: A Warm-Up gets you moving with one-step questions. Standard problems build the mechanic. Word problems put the mechanic into a real scenario. Mental-math challenges keep the shortcut sharp. "Explain It" prompts make sure you actually understand — not just memorise.
Seven free companion calculators — no sign-up, nothing to install. Every chapter is paired with a free online tool at the companion site: paycheck (hourly ↔ salary, overtime, take-home), 50/30/20 budget, compound interest (with Rule of 72), debt payoff (min vs extra payments), unit price + cost per use, marginal tax bracket, and break-even point. Same math as the book — just faster when you are checking a bill on your phone. Plus a free printable one-page toolkit with every chapter's formulas, all on one sheet.
Written for anyone who has ever felt a knot in their stomach opening a bank statement. You do not need a finance background. If you can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, you can do every problem in this book — and you will finish more confident with the numbers than you have been since school.
Educational, not advisory. This book teaches the arithmetic behind money decisions. It is not financial, tax, or investment advice. Tax examples use published US-2024 brackets to illustrate the marginal-rate math; the arithmetic itself is universal.
This book was written in collaboration with AI tools. Every worked example, exercise answer, and formula was independently checked against an automated arithmetic harness before publication — so what you see on the page is the arithmetic the book actually teaches.
Expanded & corrected printing — August 2026. Every problem in this book was re-verified against an independent arithmetic check. That pass found and fixed a small number of errors in the answer keys for the compound-interest, borrowing, smart-spending and financial-decisions chapters — a future-value figure, a loan comparison, a savings target, and a handful of worked-solution lines, etc.
The math behind money is a small, friendly set of skills. This is your workout for it.
