LFLA Seniors Experience How to Budget by Taelor



 Taelor, Class of 2018, explains what she learned on a recent field trip to the Junior Achievement Finance Park.

A few weeks ago all the seniors had the chance to gain experience of learning how finances work in the adult world. Junior Achievement Finance Park is a facility that brings in 7th-12th grades to learn about personal finance and how to better budget their money when going into adulthood. The students are given life situations and have to build a budget based on their net income. During the field trip, there were multiple things that we were “tested” through. Meaning, of the things that adults pay for, we learned how to balance the money we had from our net income and had to build a budget around the things we needed and wanted. We had to purchase clothes, food, insurance, health care, cars, etc. There was so much that you had to budget for.
In my assigned life scenario, I was 33 years old with a well paying job with a net income of $59,000 a year, was married, and had a 7 year-old child. Working a budget around those things is a lot harder versus working a budget just around yourself. Once you receive your life situation you see how much money you receive from your net income. When you first look at you think “Oh, ok I can handle this,” but when you see how much the things you need costs, you’ll start wishing you had more than what you have. There were people who had a salary of  $81,000 because they had a better paying job than I did. So, it all really depended on where you work, what your job is, and how much you were being paid for that job.

It wasn’t like you were competing with anyone because everyone had a different job, some were married some weren’t, and some had a child or two or none. There were always differences on what you could pay for and what you couldn’t. There were things like name brand products that I wanted but couldn’t get because of my budget, so I had to go with the generic version instead. The only way I could have gotten name brand things were if I had extra money left over from my budget and went back for the name brand shoes I wanted for my son, for my husband, or even for myself.  

Having this experience gave me a glance of the real world and gave me a heads up on what to be aware of. The career that I have planned is to become a Team Therapist for Major League Sports, so being a part of this experience really gave me a clue of how my life will look.

Finance U is funded by a grant from American Eagle Credit Union Foundation

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