"Free" materials created by the financial industry and distributed through nonprofits are a false economy because there's an obvious opportunity cost: most "free" materials require infrastructure and teachers. 

The effectiveness of most classroom resources, especially print-materials, depends greatly on the delivery skills and subject expertise of the teacher. Training teachers to deliver personal finance instruction is the most expensive and time-consuming part of the whole initiative.

Instructional materials, free or not, are the smallest cost component of implementing curriculum. If the state or district hasn't already created and kept updated a personal finance curriculum, it must first create one. Then the materials need to be organized into the curriculum.

The Jump$tart biannual national survey of high school students' financial literacy has rendered an average grade of "Failed" every year since inception, 1997. This is especially disappointing in light of the noticeable surge over the past three years in state-level and district-level mandates for financial education in schools.  

Most of those mandates are unfortunately unfunded or grossly underfunded. When legislators pass unfunded mandates, budget-strapped schools have to pursue "least-cost" solutions which are often slow, ineffective (if measured at all), spotty, and labor-intensive. 

A financial literacy program that doesn't require a teacher who's a Subject Matter Expert; that contains all the necessary scaffolding for student success; that measures what students really learn from it, with a comprehensive curriculum that maps to many state standards, now that's real value!