personal finance reflection

Personal finance reflection
Sarah Laskin

As my first J term, I had no idea what to expect from the personal finance course. These two weeks in personal finance have taught me so much about everything from home ownership to investing in the market and socks.

Not only have I learned a lot from this course, but I had fun while learning. For example, instead of looking at numbers and graphs while learning about expense we set up a life simulation to track expenses and costs. This not only made the assignment individual, but it required research on our interests and what we would be spending money on in the future.

Now, I am much more educated on stocks and investing, too. By being able to invest in stocks with mock money real-time with Investopedia, I was able to track certain stocks and learn about the market hands-on. We also learned about investment strategies to use in the trading game.

We also read two books over the course of two weeks. Both books were about money and saving/strategies to grow your money. I knew some of the tips from both books, but the reassurance was good. Also, I still learned a lot from both, and since we get to keep them I can always have them for reference. I am sure I will be going back to them when I am older and have more money to manage. Each day we also had seminars on the books and discussed the books and if we agreed with their recommendations about money or not.

The first week everybody was given topics to present on to the class, and this pushed me to research a lot into my topic and condense it into a presentation for my peers. I learned a lot about my classmates' topics through their presentations as well, and it was much more entertaining for me than a lecture or reading a textbook about that topic.