166 Baltimore YouthWorkers Started the Same Simulation With $1,000. They Did Not Finish the Same Way.
- Whitney Ramirez, AFC
- 10 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Every player got $1,000. Same starting balance, same roll of the die, same four stations. By the time the simulation reached retirement, the gap between the top and bottom finishers in a single room ran into six figures.
Nothing separated them except the decisions in between. That is the entire design.
Key Takeaways
Diapers 2 Deposits delivered its Game of Life financial literacy workshop to 166 MOED YouthWorks participants across six Baltimore City locations between late June and July 31, 2026.
Baltimore City's YouthWorks program, run by the Mayor's Office of Employment Development, placed thousands of residents ages 14 to 21 in paid positions for five weeks from June 29 to July 31, 2026, at up to 25 hours per week.
D2D served as an approved YouthWorks worksite host. Its nine in-house youth workers trained for five weeks as facilitators, then delivered the workshop to their peers at partner sites.
The workshop's credit card station is built on a real payoff schedule: a $296.90 balance paid at the $25 monthly minimum takes 15 months and costs about $356 at a 29.99% APR, roughly $60 in interest on a purchase under $300.
Participants are earning while they learn. D2D's own youth workers received their first MOED paycheck on July 17, 2026, and were teaching peers about paychecks the following Monday.
What D2D delivered across six Baltimore sites
Diapers 2 Deposits, the Baltimore-based financial education organization founded by Whitney Ramirez, AFC, served as an approved YouthWorks worksite host in Summer 2026. Nine D2D youth workers trained for five weeks as financial literacy facilitators, then delivered the Game of Life workshop to 166 YouthWorks participants at six locations between late June and July 31.
The sites, and what each drew:
Site | Participants |
|---|---|
Keys Dev | 55 |
Baltimore City Recreation and Parks | 34 |
MERIT Health Leadership Academy | 25 |
Baltimore Police Department | 22 |
Wildwood Elementary School | 21 |
D2D headquarters (facilitator cohort) | 9 |
Keys Dev was the summer's largest single-site session, with 55 participants moving through all four stations in one engagement.
The workshop reached D2D through a direct request. Michelle Brightful, Program Support Clerk for YouthWorks at the Mayor's Office of Employment Development, contacted Diapers 2 Deposits ahead of the summer to expand the partnership. "Based on feedback from previous summers, we know that youth benefit most from interactive, hands-on learning experiences," Brightful wrote, calling the workshop an engaging way to bring those lessons to life.
After the July 29 session at the Baltimore Police Department, Chrischelle Roman-Taylor, MBA, SPHR, IPMA-SCP, the department's Deputy Director of Human Resources, replied with four words: thank you for supporting our youth. A coordinator at MERIT Health Leadership Academy wrote that the scholars enjoyed learning financial skills they could apply in real life, particularly with college ahead of them.
How the Game of Life simulation works
The Game of Life is a four-station financial simulation hosted digitally, and it opens with one equalizing condition: every player starts with $1,000, then rolls a die that assigns a multiplier. From there, players move through Payday, Housing, Investing, and Life Happens. Every transaction posts to a running check register, and retirement is calculated at the end.
The four stations are not modules a participant can skip and still finish. Each one pulls from the same balance, which is what makes the simulation work as a teaching device rather than a quiz. Money spent at Housing is money unavailable at Investing.
Payday. A live credit card balance of $296.90 with a $25 minimum payment. Pay the minimum, pay a partial amount, or clear it in full.
Housing. A $349,000 home at roughly $2,445 per month with $45,000 down, a $169,000 home at roughly $1,285 per month with $20,000 down, or renting at an estimated $2,800 per month. A landlord or tenant card then introduces a variable the player could not see before choosing.
Investing. Stocks selected from matched pairs, inside a $1,000 ceiling. Gains and losses compound forward into the retirement figure.
Life Happens. A wheel spin and a card flip. An unexpected event, good or bad, enters the register.
Every financial literacy station feeds the same ledger. Sessions close on a leaderboard sorted by game code, showing every participant's final net worth against their peers in the room. The four-station structure is documented in more detail here, including how the stations are staffed and paced.
The leaderboard is the part facilitators watch for. A number on a worksheet is abstract. The same number ranked against the person sitting two seats away is not.
The credit card station, and the arithmetic behind it
The Payday station holds up under a calculator, which is the reason it lands. A $296.90 balance paid at the $25 monthly minimum takes 15 months to clear and costs about $356 in total, roughly $60 of interest, at an APR near 29.99%. That is a standard retail card rate, not a worst case.
Sixty dollars is not a catastrophe. That is exactly why the station teaches well. Nobody loses their financial future on a $296.90 balance.
What participants see is the shape of the thing. Fifteen months of payments on a purchase that took thirty seconds. A total that exceeds the balance by a fifth. Then the game projects the same habit forward across a working life, and its closing screen puts the compounding penalty at up to $272,000 in lost net worth by retirement.
That $272,000 is the simulation's projection, not a measured outcome, and it is worth saying so plainly to a room of 16-year-olds. The verifiable part is the 15 months and the $356. The projection is what that habit looks like if it never changes.
Players who cleared the balance in full skipped all of it. Players who paid the minimum did not lose the money in one transaction. They lost it slowly, in fifteen small pieces, which is how it actually happens.
The investing station, and what a ten-year delay costs
The Investing station is where the spread between finishers opens up. Players who bought stocks and held them watched their multiplier work. Players who skipped the station or chose conservatively left the compounding on the table, and the retirement figure showed it.
The closing lesson is the one worth carrying out of the room. At an assumed 8% annual return, $200 invested monthly starting at age 20 reaches roughly $1.05 million by age 65. The same $200 per month starting at age 30 reaches roughly $459,000. A ten-year delay costs about $596,000, and the delayed saver contributed only $24,000 less along the way.
Two things about that comparison matter more than the headline number.
First, the assumed rate has to be stated or the figure means nothing. Change 8% to 6% and the 45-year total drops to about $551,000. Anyone can check the arithmetic against the SEC's compound interest calculator at Investor.gov, and participants should be told to.
Second, the ten years being lost are the cheapest ten years the saver will ever have. A 20-year-old contributes $200 from a smaller income than a 30-year-old does, and gets a far larger result for it, because time is doing most of the work rather than the money.
That is the argument for putting this in front of YouthWorks participants specifically. A 16-year-old who understands the shape of that curve still has the whole curve in front of them. The D2D Investor's Club running in Baltimore City schools is the follow-on for participants who want to keep going past a single session.
Why a paid summer job is the right room for this lesson
YouthWorks creates a condition a classroom cannot replicate: participants are being paid while they learn. MOED pays YouthWorks participants for their summer positions, and financial literacy development is already part of the program design, which means the workshop lands on prepared ground rather than arriving cold.
The sequencing at D2D was almost too neat. The nine youth workers received their first MOED paycheck on July 17, 2026. The following Monday they were teaching their peers what to do with one.
A young person who has just felt the weight of a real paycheck, and seen what came out of it before it reached them, processes a lesson about minimum payments and investment windows differently than one who has not. The money inside the simulation is fake. The deposit that cleared on Friday is not, and the two sit close enough together that participants make the connection without being told to.
That is also why the facilitators being peers matters. The nine youth workers who ran these sessions are inside the same age band as the participants, on the same pay schedule, facing the same first-paycheck decisions. It is the same principle behind interns doing work that ships rather than work that gets discarded in August.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Game of Life financial literacy workshop?
It is a four-station financial simulation from Diapers 2 Deposits in which every participant starts with $1,000 and moves through Payday, Housing, Investing, and Life Happens. Every choice posts to a running check register, retirement is calculated at the end, and the session closes on a leaderboard of final net worth.
How many YouthWorks participants did D2D reach in Summer 2026?
166 MOED YouthWorks participants across six Baltimore City sites: Keys Dev, Baltimore City Recreation and Parks, MERIT Health Leadership Academy, the Baltimore Police Department, Wildwood Elementary School, and D2D headquarters.
Who is eligible for Baltimore's YouthWorks program?
Baltimore City residents ages 14 to 21. YouthWorks 2026 ran for five weeks from June 29 to July 31, with participants working up to five hours a day and 25 hours a week. Applications open in early January each year.
Are the retirement figures in the simulation real?
No. They are projections generated inside the simulation to show the direction and scale of a decision, not forecasts of any individual's outcome. The payoff schedules and rate assumptions are checkable arithmetic. The retirement totals are illustrations built on an assumed rate of return.
Can an organization host this workshop?
Yes. Diapers 2 Deposits delivers the Game of Life workshop to schools, nonprofits, workforce programs, and government agencies. The digital version is hosted at d2dmoneyhub.com/game-life.
What the next cohort should get
The strongest thing about running this inside YouthWorks is that nobody had to be convinced the money was real. Participants had payroll forms, hours, and a deposit date. The simulation just gave them a place to test decisions where the consequences were survivable.
Six sites and 166 participants is one summer. The gap the workshop illustrates, between a saver who starts at 20 and one who starts at 30, is roughly $596,000 at an 8% return, and every participant in those rooms is still on the right side of it.
Organizations planning a youth financial literacy program in Baltimore, or anywhere else, can run the Game of Life workshop at their own site, and families can work through the same stations directly at d2dmoneyhub.com/game-life. For the broader picture of what financial capability gaps look like across Baltimore City schools, see our analysis of the Blueprint for Maryland's Future financial literacy gap.
