Personal Finance - Final Reflection

     One of the main draws of the Personal Finance J-Term are the student reviews; the most common one, year after year, is "I've never learned so much in two weeks." As someone who new nothing about balancing a budget, watching my spending, or investing--and as someone who was about to go to college and inevitably be cash tight--I felt like I needed this course. Two weeks later, I'm proud to report that I was right! Through Personal Finance I learned the basics of budgeting, investing, and mindful spending. 

    Personal Finance is a course of two parts, exemplified by our two readings, Your Money Or Your Life by Vicki Robin, and Why Didn't They Teach Me This In School? by Cary Siegel. Your Money Or Your Life, for me, was really the highlight of the course. As one of the original texts of the FIRE movement (Financial Independence; Retire Early), I was initially a little skeptical about what it had to say. The FIRE movement has a reputation of being overwhelmingly white, single, and filled with loners; its blogs and texts often don't take into account race, gender, marriage, or care. This makes them created for a singular demographic, even though FIRE presents itself as being open for everyone. Your Money Or Your Life, however, was personalized personal finance. Rather than creating a strict budget for you to follow, or telling you to bike to work with no regard for geographic changes in weather conditions, Your Money Or Your Life intends to change your relationship with money. It wants you to see money as the proceeds of expending your life energy, so that the next time you buy another doodad, you think of its cost as 3 1/2 hours of life energy rather than $50. I really liked this approach to personal finance, because it can be worked into everyone's lives regardless of their current situation. You get to create your own budget. You get to choose what spending is important to you. And you get to do it after learning how to be a mindful money manager. A lot of what we did for this class, such as tracking our spending and creating a list of our values, were connected to this text, which is what makes it the first pillar of Personal Finance. 

    Why Didn't They Teach Me This In School? is the second pillar. It stands in for the more traditional side of money management--the side that gives you more tips than you could possibly remember to cut your spending--and teaches you a variety of different strategies to save and grow your wealth. Why Didn't They Teach Me This In School? doesn't account for anybody's life situation, but it does give so much advice that it would be impossible not to have something in the book that works for you. It also introduced to us the value of real estate, saving through the stock market rather than a savings account, a plethora of cost cutting strategies, and it created a standardized budget we can use if we want. I want to make it clear that although I see some limitations in the effectiveness of a such a 'one size fits all' approach to personal finance, that does not mean that Why Didn't They Teach Me This In School? was not a valuable text. I learned an immense amount from its money management tips, and from the investing, saving, and real estate exercises we did as a class as a part of this second pillar. 

    Although it's a well-worn trope at this point, I'm going to say that I've never learned so much in a two week period. Personal Finance laid the foundation for me to be a financially smart college student and an even smarter adult. I'm really happy I took this course while I had the chance, and I highly recommend it to everyone, whether they're interested or not. You don't want to be crushed by debt in your twenties, reading about how to get out of it, thinking "why didn't they teach me this in school?"