J-Term Personal Finance 2021

 This course taught me many valuable skills such as how to manage a credit card and when it is smart to invest in things such as stocks, a house, and a credit card. I also learned and probably my biggest take away is that when I first get my credit card I need to miss one payment so I can get a credit score. I also know some ways that I can get income without working a lot of work goes into that, the best way I learned to do that is through real estate and renting out units to people. I also learned how to manage money and how to pay off debt faster and what kind of loans to get. This was the best course I have ever taken it informed me so much about finance. 

 On the last day of the personal finance class, I reflected on the material that I had come to learn over the length of the course. We started out with relatively mundane subjects such as federal and state taxes, home ownership, and insurance types. This quickly turned into advanced lessons on a multitude of financial subjects, and I found myself learning about stock trading, asset diversification and management, and entrepreneurial strategies. I gained a sense of how truly complicated the financial world really was, and the information I learned throughout this course will have properly prepared me for the actual real world I will most likely face in just a couple years. One excerpt from the information I found on my topic of asset allocation I found very interesting, as it gives a good understanding of the type of material found in the course; "The most common usage of the term "asset manager" refers to investment management, the sector of the financial services indust...

Today was yet another information packed day. I was really happy to get on the zoom call because our topic of the day was investing and options. Ilan came in and had a presentation ready for us. I learned a lot about what to do when it comes to putting your money on the line when buying stocks. The key to staying organized is creating a spreadsheet and keeping a log of every single investment you have made. It is proven that seeing what you've done right and wrong all on one page is extremely helpful. Then, we got into options, which I had little to no idea what they were before, and now I am ready to practice buying and selling. An option is basically a bet were you say that a stock is either going to go up or down.  A call  option  gives the holder the right to buy a stock and a put  option  gives the holder the right to sell a stock. Options are a major risk but a great way to improve your portfolio and get money fast. Somethings that Ilan ensured we do when ...

 January 13th was quite interesting in personal finance. On this day we had all just finished Why Didn't they Teach us this in School , and we had a discussion on some the "quick tips" that were listed at the end of the book. What I thought was rather interesting was that when the book mentioned to "Drive your car until it drops" Dr. Ott mentioned that we shouldn't literally do this, but instead once the car's repairs cost more than the car itself we should get a new car. We also had a seminar on chapter 8 of  Your Money or Your Life , and we talked about the crossover point, how we're able to reach this point, and what to do once you reach this point. After the seminar we all took a break from our hard work and we watched a movie called Trading Places . It was a comedic movie, but it mainly informed us of buying into commodities. Later in the day we shortly had a discussion on how we felt about the total net worth percentage we currently have in our...

    On the second to last day of Personal Finance, it was finally time to discuss real estate. By now we had already learned about other forms of asset allocation, and what we had read in Why Didn't They Teach Me This In School and Your Money Or Your Life had discussed how real estate could be one of the best ways to grow your net worth and passive income. To expand on that idea, my cousin Connor McGill came to talk to us. Connor is a young entrepreneur who, using some of the profits from his businesses, is investing in real estate to supplement his active income. Connor talked about the pros and cons of buying duplexes, 4-plexes, and flipping homes. He told us about his successes, struggles, and what he has learned after making three deals. We discussed when the best time was to fairly raise rent, if you need to at all, and what to watch out for when buying real estate. There are often closing costs, repair costs, and advertising costs that go overlooked when you are b...

 Today was another really productive day, and we got a lot done. We started out the day with the presentations we hadn't finished yesterday. The presentations were on mortgages, which was presented by Alex, and on federal taxes, which was presented by me. Both presentations were very informative, and I feel like I have a lot more knowledge about both topics. Dr. Ott also helped some of the more nuanced concepts we were unable to present on, such as the different tax schedule forms.  Once we finished the presentations, we watched the film The Big Short to learn a bit more about the markets and Wall Street. The film is about a group of investors discovering that the US mortgage market is a bubble and the subsequent crash of that market which caused the 2008 financial crisis. There were a lot of financial terms that I didn't understand, but it definitely helped and allowed me to gain a better understanding of what happened to the market at that time.  After the movie and a b...

 Yesterday was... definitely a day. In between being glued to our television screens, We learned multiple things, such as our personal values and how to use Investopedia. Additionally, we discussed the books that we had read. With personal values, Dr. Ott had us create a list of qualities that were most important to us. Once you had your personal values, you would give a name for them, such as compassionate warrior. Investopedia is a website which mimics the stock market. It uses real figures, but you are not spending real cash. We are using this as a tool to learn about the stock market and different functions within it, such as short-selling. As this is the one of the first blogs of this J-Term, I will give some extra information on the books. We are reading "Your Money Or Your Life" by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, as well as " Why Didn't They Teach Me This In School?" by Cary Siegel. These two books relate to, as you likely guessed, personal finance. They t...