Interdisciplinary
Fin 1010 Personal Finance
Reflection
- The three most important things that I learned in this personal finance course were how to work in the stock market, the different types of insurance, and how to research and purchase a car. To learn how the stock market works, our instructor organized a multiclass game on http://www.marketwatch.com/game/. For roughly two months we worked the stock market by virtually buying and selling different types of stocks. The person who had the most money at the end of the game period won the game. To study the different types of insurance we all divided into groups and researched a different type of insurance, i.e. life, disability, auto. After we finished our research we presented our findings. To learn how to research and buy cars, we went onto different sites and researched a few cars and determined which was the most practical and the cheapest car.
- The concepts that I learned in this class that I will use the most are probably buying a home, buying a car, insurance, taxes, and basic budgets. This is a finance class and everybody has to deal with different financial situation, so this is a very helpful class. I know that I will buy a home in my life so it was helpful to learn how to do that, I know I will buy a car sometime in the future so gaining that information will help me soon. Everybody needs some insurances and it is a good idea to have protection from unforseen circumstances so I know that insurance was a good concept to learn. Every body has to pay taxes; there's no way around it. If there's something I have to do, I might as well learn how to do it correctly. In order to stay financially secure we all need to know how to maintain a budget. This is the base of financial success, earning a paycheck, and figuring out a responsible way to spend that money so you can life confortably thruought your life.
- The concepts that I learned in this class that I will use the least are probably the stock market, and social security. According to the game that we played, I kind of failed at the stock market. In the begining i bought a bunch of random stocks that were in the red, thinking that they would eventually go up, but they didn't. Every day they lost me more and more money so eventually, to prevent from losing any more, I sold most of them. After that i decided to think about what I was buying. I thought about things that would go up in the coming summer like Harley Davidson, and I researched different well known stocks like google, general electric, apple, and facebook and if they had a number that advised to buy them, I would. I slowly gained more money with my researched stocks, but then about a week left in the game, they all turned a deep red color and I ended in 54th place out of 92. Social security was also something that I thought was useless because I know that the governement will probably not give me enough money to survive when I do reach the age of retirement. Reguardless, it helped us learn different ways to plan retirement.
