Learning about life
There were a lot of things that we did in my personal financial planning class last semester that I really wasn't expecting to do at all. We learned about planning for the future and everything that entails and we had a huge project where we had to decide where we would be ten years from now (married, with kids, what kind of job) and then we had to look up salaries, find houses, cars, plan a budget, look into home insurance, auto insurance and even schools for the kids that we might have.
The project was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It was supposed to teach us about how expensive living is right now and how much more expensive it is going to get when we get out of school and are ten years in the future. So that we could learn to plan ahead. We had to look up cars and homes in the city or state we wanted to live in. I picked Chicago, but plenty of my classmates chose to live in places far away. I think I even saw Texas online car quotes in the girl's project that sits next to me. Maybe she's from Texas now and wants to go back there or maybe she even just wants to live there, who knows. But it was hard to find homes (actual homes from actual listings) and figure out a mortgage payment to fit into our budgets.
I think the hardest part was finding medical insurance. When I searched it online, it came up with a ton of different things like UniCare and other searches and I had to go through a lot of them to figure out what fit my ‘lifestyle'. There were also other things we didn't think of right away that had to be added to our budget. Like if we planned on traveling, we needed to figure in travel medical insurance. Or auto insurance based on our health and age and so on.
It really was hard to plan for the future, but to be truthful; we really need to start, even though we are only 18 years old or 20 years old. It is never too early to start saving up and learning about money and investments. The more you know, the better the choices you can make for your future. Because unlike in this assignment, if you make the wrong choice, you don't just lose a few points from your grade.