The Three most important things I have learned in this class are: 1) It is crucial in life to develop plans and goals, creating a budget and following it. 2) The dangers of credit cards and taking out loans, and the consequences if you don't follow through with it. 3) All the risks and smart ways to go about buying a car or house. All these points are critical in everyone's life, and we could all be further educated in these aspects.
I think the concept i will use the most in this class is taxes. Having a job means paying taxes. It sucks that i don't get the full amount of money i worked for, but hopefully, if by some miracle occurs, i will be able to get that money back after I retire, through social security and medicare. I hope to also learn a lot more about taxes and dealing with them as i go on through life. i don't want to end up getting tied down by the law or by the banks because i failed to do taxes correctly.
i think the concept i will use the least in this class would probably be moving out. just because i will only do this once! at least i hope so because that would be embarrassing to have to move back in with my parents and then move back out again! and i probably won't move out for a little while, just because i'm a greedy kid and want to save my money as much as i can.
THE STOCK MARKET
We are going to go over the basics of the stock market such as what exactly is the stock market what is involved in the stock market what dividends are and why companies issue stock out to the public. To understand the Stock Market you first have to understand what stocks are.
Stocks are a small portion of the company that you own when you buy the stock. So when you buy a stock you are in all reality a small owner of that company. The stock market is the core of American economic system. There are two types of stocks, Common stock and Preferred stock. Common stock are what most of the US citizens own. They just represent the majority of stocks held by the public. Preferred stocks aren’t really based on the stock market whether it’s up or down. What preferred stocks do is they pay dividends to the people that own part of them. What dividends are is the company paying you for having stocks in them. The amount paid to you is based off of the profit the company is making.
One of the best things you can do when you are going to buy stocks is to spread out your money in many different stocks. This is called diversification. It is best to do this because if you put all your money into one stock that stock could do really well and make you a huge amount of money but in most cases they all fall and they could lose you all your money that way you won’t be able to invest in any other stocks that are doing good because all your money was lost because wither the company went bankrupt or people just don’t want it anymore.
Another part of the stock market is Bonds. Bonds are a type of debt the company issues to investors for a specified amount of time. So when the company needs money for whatever reason whether it’s they need it to expand or they are hurting a little and need to get back on their feet they will give you bond which says that you gave them this amount of money to help them out and later on down the road they will pay back that money with interest. So when you do Bonds you are earning money. It might not be right then like it is in the actual stock market but you are guaranteed to get more money when all is said and done.
Another part we should go over is why companies issue stock out to the public. The companies issue stock because they would like to grow out and they would need more money to grow so they issue stocks. So then they can grow with your money and if they do well in the process you get extra money back. But if a company doesn’t do well then they don’t have to repay the money the stock holders gave them to grow companies like this because they aren’t “responsible” for them doing bad so they don’t have to pay you back. So there are advantages and disadvantages to buying stock in the stock market.
