Personal Finance Reflection Paper

1. I have learned a lot about Personal Finance from taking this class, but there are three important concepts that I found particularly interesting as well as vital to my everyday life. The 1st major concept that I learn about from this class was the steps of home buying. I had a very broad understanding of how this process occurred because of hearing about the struggles and successes my parents experienced during the purchase of our most recent home. I learned that in order to buy a home, you need to get your assets in order and get approved for a mortgage. However, I did not understand the specifics of how this process happened and what I need to do in order to make this process a success. The outline of this process provided on page 261

Achieving your financial goals through Budgeting is a concept that I feel should be challenged to some extent. It is not that I disagree with the need to do this in order to achieve your financial goals, I just feel that the process of creating an in-depth budget like we did in class may be outdated in the near future. With my online banking program, I can see where I spent my money and how much I spent. I can very easily copy and paste this information onto a Word document and calculate this information to create a balance sheet that way. I think that as this kind of computer program progresses, we might get to the point where your expenditures will automatically get categorized based on where the charge comes from. I could see these programs and applications reaching a point where you can automatically produce a balance sheet for a requested time span just through a few clicks. You could even include cash withdrawals from an ATM into these kinds of balance sheets by selecting a memo or title to attach to the withdrawal and select where it will be placed in your balance sheet when you log onto your account over the computer. Having watched how my online banking program has changed in the past few years, I could see features like this being created in the near future and would thus make the process of creating a balance sheet like the book described a little