Final Reflection - Alex Gross

Throughout the personal finance course, the group learned basic facts about Personal Finance that would help us in our lives, and we also started to delve deeper into some complex ideas. Over the past two weeks, there were two readings that we focused on, which taught us some tips to be financially smart, and how to get to Financial Independence. Financial Independence was defined as the point in your life where you are able to live off of income you receive from investment income. It also is based around the idea that you could quit your job and live unemployed. These ideas are based fully on what each person considers "enough" to live off of. To me, this taught a lot of skills that I will use in my life, and although the book Your Money or Your Life seems like it was created for adults; I believe that having the opportunity to read this book at my age will benefit me for the rest of my life. Some of the topics that were presented by fellow students were: first-time homeownership, federal taxes, the stock market, credit cards, and many other extremely useful topics.  Without this Personal Finance course, I don't know if I would have ever taken the time to learn any of what we covered because I never knew how much bulk there was to this topic. In these past two weeks, I learned more than I expected by far. Some of the in-class activities that I think benefited me a lot were mini-projects that taught us about buying and renting out a quadplex, creating a simulation for all of our income and expenses until we are 57 years old, and trying to list everything we have spent and taken in during our entire lives so far. All of these are reasons why I think everyone at our school and everyone in the country should be pushed to, or required to take this course. The only critique I think I would have is that this is not a full-time class at our school and only a two-week course. There is so much stuff that we did not have time to go into because of the short length of our time here. In the future, I believe that the impact of this course on everyone in this class will make our financial lives better. Something that seems very interesting and different to me is that this class didn't only teach us how to make more money. It also was trying to show that it is okay to have less and be content with it. As long as you are using your life in a way that you are making a living, instead of making a dying as some nine to five jobs do, the amount of money doesn't matter. There is no defining point at which you have enough to live off of forever. Everyone has different financial wants and needs. The statement that money doesn't buy happiness is true, even though you can buy some short term things that will bring you joy for a short time. It is true however that lack of money can bring great stress and sadness into your life. I don't think everyone in our class realizes it yet, but at some point, everyone here will realize what an impact this course has had on their life for the better. I already tried applying some things I learned in this class to my life and can see the impact it is having on me. I have a strong desire to take this course again next year because of the number of people that are retaking it this year, and that there are new concepts that they can study rather than doing the exact same thing they did the previous year.