Day 1: Welcome to Personal Finance!

3/18 morning

Today was the first day of M-Term, and for ten lucky students including me, it was the first day of the Personal Finance M-Term! We started the morning with introductions and recaps of our various spring break plans, and then got right into a preface of our syllabus for the next two weeks. Our teacher, Ms. Agrawal, explained to us that we will be covering two general topics: the basics of personal finance (first week) and the basics of investing (second week). She went into depth about what we would be doing this week, in which the concepts we would be covering include banking, debt, credit, insurance, spending, and saving. We will be learning how to wisely and successfully manage our finances as young adults in the real world. 

After the basic intro to the syllabus, we chose our presentation topics for our individual presentations this week. We each signed up for one personal finance topic, one investment topic, and one day that we would be blogging. After selecting our topics, Ms. Agrawal passed out journals and pens that we'd be keeping to make entries in every day, and she even bought us stickers that we could use to personalize them! We took a break after decorating our journals, and then had the rest of the morning to work on our individual presentations. We had a lunch break at 11:45, and agreed that we would meet back at 12:45 for an exciting guest speaker.

                      

                My individual presentation on 'Loan Types'                         My Personal Finance journal!

3/18 afternoon

We came back to class after lunch well-fed and ready for the second portion of class, which consisted of a presentation by guest speaker Tom Cabanski and an introduction to Investopedia by our second course leader, Dr. Quillin. Ms. Agrawal passed out the book we'd be reading over these two weeks, which is Dave Ramsey's Complete Guide to Money, by Dave Ramsey. 

Dave Ramsey's Complete Guide to Money

At 1:00, we set up the Zoom meeting with Mr. Cabanski and he began his talk. He explained that this talk would not be specifically about the book, but more generally to introduce the Dave Ramsey method of financial freedom. Basically, financial freedom is living below your means in order to pay off debts and build savings and financial peace. He taught us how paying off debt and even becoming a millionaire is absolutely possible through the method of financial freedom, and it is the economic philosophy that has allowed him to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and become a millionaire over the course of a decade. He led us through a couple exercises that taught us about net worth and financial peace. He gave us a general intro to wise monthly budgeting, how to get out
of a 'debt snowball', and some tips on how much money should be put into retirement, future children's college funds, mortgage, and investing. Mr. Cabanski left us with the final message that it is never too early to start saving, and the key to saving is "living below your means". 

My Investopedia Simulator homepage (i've been struggling)

We said goodbye to Mr. Cabanski, and then took a short break. At around 2:30, Dr. Quillin greeted us as we reentered the classroom. He showed us how to set up an Investopedia Simulator account and log into the 2024 Personal Finance Trading Game. Over these two weeks, we have been given $25,000 in simulation money to invest into at least 10 different stocks. We will be tracking different stocks and seeing how investments and stock market trends work. Our goal is to learn about investing using this simulator, but also, the person with the most money at the end of the two weeks will win the game and a TBD prize. We played around with our simulation stocks and looked up stocks of companies that we knew of. At this point, it was 3:15, and we were all ready to do jobs and go home. Overall, a great first day back!