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.

Final Reflection - Asher

Asher Forman
Dr. Ott
Personal Finance
17 January 2020

Reflection

     Personal Finance is something that everyone needs to learn so that one can be prepared for their future. This was my second year of doing personal finance, and I learned so much more. Being a returning student, we had to pick a book of interest, and 'The Intelligent Investor' caught my eye. This book talked about speculation vs value investing, the defensive investor, and portfolios. Since I am a novice investor, I was curious about how I could further my knowledge around this topic. Another thing I did in Personal Finance was an in-depth research about retirement. I was interested in retirement because I would like to retire early, and I wanted to know how I could get started. I found out about 401ks, IRA accounts, Social Security, Annuities, and how much money one will need to retire. Retirement is something that so many people ignore, and become stressed about when they are in their forties and haven't put money into a retirement account. Getting a headstart on this early, and understanding one's options is incredibly important so that one can have a worry-free financial future. Another thing that returnees did was to pick a topic that interests them, and then do a research project about it. I decided to research bonds, as this is something I am considering buying, and I wanted to understand my different choices. Bonds can potentially be one of the safest investments that one can buy for their portfolio. Through this research, I learned about the different types of bonds, bond ratings, characteristics, and interest rate sensitivity. I feel like I have learned an incredible amount even after doing the second year of this course. I would recommend this course to anyone that wants to learn about finances whether one is a beginner or advanced. There are always more things to learn around finance so that one can become 'The Intelligent Investor.'

Final Reflection - Catherine

Over the course of these past two weeks, I have learned more about personal finance than I have in my entire life. I thought this course was highly beneficial because it gave me an overview of all the financial decisions I will have to make in the future and made me consider different financial approaches that could help me achieve financial independence as early as possible. The two books that we read, "Your money or your life" and "Why didn't they teach me this in school" both taught me great lessons that I will definitely reference later on in my life. I thought it was interesting to explore our relationship with money and how our money values were usually established at a young age can affect how and why we manage our money in the future. I started this course with minimal knowledge about investing or stocks so my initial stock decisions on Investopedia were mostly random or based on what other people were buying or selling. I then learned about technical analysis, specifically the moving averages/crossover strategy which allowed me to make educated and for the most part successful investing decisions on my own. It was also interesting to walk through all the expenses that I will have to make in my life and get an estimate of how much wealth I can accumulate and what age I might retire. Some of my biggest takeaways are that starting to put aside money for retirement as early as possible, investing, and saving a good part of your salary are key to achieving financial independence. I'm glad I had the opportunity to learn about personal finance as early as high school and can't wait to apply the financial principles throughout my life journey.

Friday 1/17/2020 - Sage

Today we spent the bulk of the morning creating our J-Term presentation for next week. The presentation is meant to sum up everything we learned/did in the past two weeks. This includes any topics we covered, such as the stock market, any movies we watched, any books we read, and any activities we took part in. After we finished up the slides for our presentation, we took a break for Julian to present on what you can expect if you plan to invest while living abroad. We learned that if you live in a foreign country, but are still a US citizen, you may get double taxed on certain investments, and the general advantages and disadvantages of emigration. After that, Francesco, Sierra, Clark, and Asher presented on the books they chose to read independently throughout the J-Term. Francesco read a collection of essays by Warren Buffett, Sierra read The Simple Path To Wealth, Asher read The Intelligent Investor, and Clark read Option Volatility and Pricing. To finish the day up, each of us wrote a reflection on the past two weeks and walked through our presentation a couple of times.  

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.

Personal Finance - Thursday

Thursday

Thursday was quite an eventful day. We started Thursday with a mini project that dealt with trying to make a profit off of a fourplex in an assigned city. The assigned cities were Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Portland. Persi, Andreas, and Alex were working on San Francisco, Asher, Luke, and I worked on finding a fourplex in Houston, Sierra and Clark worked on finding one in Pittsburg, Sarah, Sage, and Francesco were working on Philadelphia, and finally, Sutton, Julian, and Catherine were on the job to find a fourplex in Portland. Our goal was to find a fourplex that could get 3 units to cover mortgage, insurance, and taxes. It took all of us a while, but, in the end, we all found a fourplex that we could afford and make some equity on it from the college students renting in it. Afterwards, we all had to report on what our fourplexes’ were located, the down payment, monthly payment, the rents charged for the fourplex, and the average rent in the area. When we presented our fourplexes, they weren’t in the greatest shape because they were in some major cities and we had to get them for a low price. We then had some free time and played our game of Investopedia. After that we then set up and started to watch a movie called “The Ultimate Gift”. It was about a Grandfather who had just recently passed and left his will to his family and friends. The people in the family seem rather snooty. They complained about what they got from the will and what they didn’t. One of the kids was not treated kindly by his grandfather and, to make it up to him, he ‘lead him on trail’ of a series of gifts after he got one after the other leading up to the ultimate gift. The ultimate gift was for him to realize the importance of life. Afterwards, we ended up continuing our game of investopedia and relaxed for the rest of the day. 

Personal Finance - Tuesday

      We started this Tuesday off with presentations from the returning students on topics of their interest. I presented first on wills, trusts, and behavioral finance; I spoke on the importance of all of these and how they relate to our personal finance lives. Francesco followed with his presentation on fraud. He began by connecting to The Big Short, which we watched yesterday, through talking on the legality of some of the actions of the banks and big corporations mentioned in the movie. Francesco went on to talk about different forms of fraud, how it can happen at any time, and how to not fall for scams. Next up was Asher who gave an in-depth presentation on bonds, the different types, ratings, and uses. Understanding bonds is extremely important especially as it relates to the stock market and portfolio diversification and Asher explained all of it very well. Last but not least, Clark presented on options trading. He explained what options are, the related terminology, and why people trade options. Options are by far one of the most complex and difficult topics to learn, however, I think Clark did a great job introducing them to the class. All of the presentations went well and the class certainly learned a lot! After a quick break, we dove into a seminar on our books and asked numerous questions on both technical/ factual topics and philosophical topics, for instance, does "money buy happiness"? We talked about having values, thinking about money in terms of life energy, and the power of money. Our seminars are a great way to answer factual questions and pose open questions to discuss. Following lunch, Mr. Ying, an entrepreneur who started out as a doctor, came and talked through his experience, how he found his passion, and how he got to where he is now. He gave all of us insightful knowledge and some high-quality advice. Mr. Ying was able to relate his story to us and he showed us where hard work and curiosity can take you. The class was extremely fortunate to be able to hear from Mr. Ying and we learned a lot about what it takes to be a successful person. Near the end of the day, new students played the Game of Life. They had to roll dice to get a scenario and depending on that scenario they adjusted their income, expenses and net worth of their game accordingly. The goal of this game is to show that anything could happen to you during your life and you should be financially prepared. While dice were being thrown, returning students read their books of choice trying their best to soak up as much financial knowledge as possible. Today was eventful and filled with many learning opportunities as we are investing our time and effort into our financial future!