1st Quarter Project-Using Money to Earn Money

1st Quarter Project-Using Money to Earn Money

You will work in pairs for this project. First, you are assigned an occupation. The age of the person working is about 28 and has five years of experience in his/her field. You will need to write a description of the person, including his/her typical week, hobbies, family engagements, marital status, parenting status (kids or no kids), and non-profit volunteering they might be involved in. You are trying to create a virtual person in this phase of the project. You should also include the person’s salary. You should submit a one page, typed, double-spaced paper for this section (no bullets Miki  ). It is due on February 12th.

Next, a budget must be created. The budget must be thorough. It should cover every regular monthly expense and miscellaneous categories for those expenditures that inevitably arise, but are unpredictable. Taxes and leisure activities are a necessary part of any budget. You will need to find out how much to pay in taxes each month. You can estimate your federal taxes at the following site: http://www.finance.cch.com/sohoApplets/TaxEZ1040.asp. You also need to estimate your FICA and your California income taxes (you can use the following table to estimate your CA income taxes: http://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/07_forms/07_5402eztt.pdf ).
The budget is due on February 19th.

The third step involves creating an investment portfolio. This is the heart of the project. You can use your Learn to Earn book and your textbook (Chapter 11 will be helpful). Also, www.about.com is an excellent resource to use to get started. Check out these sites from about.com:

http://financialplan.about.com/ -this page is a good place to start.
http://financialplan.about.com/od/personalfinance/tp/personalfinance101.htm -this page covers budgeting and more
http://financialplan.about.com/od/planningforlifestages/Planning_for_Life_Stages.htm -this page deals with financial issues that arise at certain points in life-pre-marriage, marriage, marriage with kids, etc.
http://financialplan.about.com/od/retirementplanning/Retirement_Planning.htm -check out tips on retirement planning from this page.

You can and should use other resources other than about.com. The resources that you are using to help make wise stock market investment decisions will, in most cases, be useful in developing an investment portfolio for your person. You must use at least four sources. If about.com is used, it counts as one source, even if different pages are used. The sources must be reputable. If you have a question about whether a source is reputable, please ask your teacher first. Your investment portfolio will be based on how much money you have to spend based on your budget. Your budget has to be approved by me, so you cannot manipulate the numbers.

The third step is due March 4th. Please submit a hard copy and an electronic copy via email to my school account (kditzenberger@ics.edu.sg). The investment portfolio must include a brief list of the investments followed by a double-spaced, page-long, written explanation of the decisions that were made in developing the portfolio. I may give a copy of your plan to an investment advisor to analyze for your benefit, so an electronic copy will help facilitate this. If you have a low paying career, you can use any excess money or credit that you may have to make an investment in additional education.

The fourth and final step is to simply evaluate whether your plan has worked-have you made your life better by the financial decision you have chosen? In this section, you should take a typed, double-space page (minimum) and answer the following question-what worked and what would I change that I have control over? The fourth step is due March 11th. When the fourth step has been completed, the four steps must be revised according to any comments made by the teacher and submitted as one project.

The project is due on the 20th (the last day of the quarter, however, it can be turned in early. If you have several tests the last couple of days, you may want to have this done early). Any investments must be tracked and charted on a bi-weekly basis (Monday and Thursday or Tuesday and Friday) through the 14th. If stocks are purchased, a 2% brokerage fee must be deducted. Yahoo has widgets that can help with the tracking of stock prices. There are other tools available as well to make this fairly easy.

A rubric will follow soon. Sorry that I do not have it ready yet. Please take the weekend off. This weekend is meant for you to enjoy with your family, especially if you are of Chinese or Korean ancestry. Happy New Year!