Personal Finance - Friday

The final day of our first week started with some collaborative open work time in which the group worked on our templates for our life simulation game. We got to create a chart of all of the money that we think will be spent (Food, Clothes, Utilities, Housing, Debt, etc.) and then put everything we will earn (Salary, Savings Accounts, Stock Market, Gifts, IRA, etc.) and we would be able to see our net worth at the end of that year. Everything that isn’t spent goes into savings. Another factor in this process was where we want to go to college, and finding out starting salaries in the field we are interested in. Next week we will use a simple process to determine some possible outcomes of our lives. After this, we had three students present on topics of their choice. The first was about the stock market and we learned about getting and investment strategy and sticking with it. The next presentation was about smart real estate investment. I took away a lot from this presentation because I learned that everyone gets to make their own real estate investments and there is never going to be one correct way to go about this process. The final presentation was about alternative markets for example commodities and the pros and cons of investing in them. The group briefly discussed the two books we are currently reading, in specific the chapters about debt and self-fulfillment. We are learning about how to manage debt, and strategies on how to get out of it, while also learning about finding what is “enough” for you so you never have to go into debt at all. This week we got to choose a couple of podcasts to listen to and blogs to read, and then we talked about them with the group. Some of the ones we discussed in class were about stock market strategies, homeownership, and several other general topics. After all of these discussions, most of us had questions, and these sparked into two main conversations. The first was about commodities and ended with the entire class having a common understanding of commodity investment, and the second conversation was about an advanced strategy to pay off mortgages at a faster rate called the Home Equity Line of Credit Strategy or “HELOC”. To end the day we had a little time to use our stock strategies on Investopedia, the stock simulator game that we have been using since the beginning of this course. I think the entire group would agree that we learned an immense amount of important life information in just four days and that we are all excited for another week of this course.