Financial Planning

Hey hey hey. Last night I went to an event in Jack Morton Auditorium called "You're Life, Your Money." The event was put on by WETA Public Broadcasting as a part of an on-going program with GW.  A panel of execs (Mitch Slater, VP for Wealth Management at Smith Barney; Jeffrey Weaver, Vice President for Wealth Management at HSBC Bank; Kerry Hannon, Contributing Editor for US News & World Report, and Ben Levy, Young Money Inc.) came to give us tips to about how best to save, spend, and invest our money. Now I'm not a finance major or anything, and really I don't care to talk about money, but I also don't want to be broke, so I decided to go talk about it. Here's the short-hand of what I took away from the experience:


*30% of your income should go towards rent
*20% should go towards debts
*10% should be put into savings
*MAKE A BUDGET
*Many employers after college have plans to help you pay back loans
*You should have a multi-faceted savings plan
*If you have to choose between saving and paying off a card, it isn't necessarily better to pay off the debt first
*ALWAYS pay yourself first
*Make your money work for you (it sounds cliche, but very few people ACTUALLY do this)
*The average college student has between 4&5 credit cards!!!!!!!!!!!!
*This is not a good time to consolidate student loans
*Freecreditreport.com isn't actually free!!!!
*GWorld makes us overspend miserably


In between discussions they showed a video which featured Donald Faison (the dude from Scrubs!) and he went into detail about the way or money works inside of a bank, as well as common mistakes students make regarding loans and budgeting. Personally I had never heard a lot of what the panelists had to say, and that was kind of the point. Students aren't told a lot of this information, and once you get out of college, the information isn't "free," anymore. So I'm going to try some of the suggestions he made about budgeting-including tracking my spending for the last two weeks. I haven't really been overspending, but I also need to start figuring out where my money is actually going (e.g. One week I spent the same amount on Starbucks as I did on groceries). Also, they told us about several websites we could check out to help us track and maintain our financial goals:


*Mint.com- Makes creating a budget easy!
*Annualcreditreport.com- Will give you a REAL free credit report once a year
*myfico.com- For tips to build up your credit score

Questions/Comments: magalae@gmail.com

Ekiria