My goal is to become financially literate. That means understanding my own finances, what it means to open up a bank account, own a credit card, and pay my taxes. That also means understanding the stock market, the economy, investing, and cryptocurrency. I seek to understand money as a whole: its history, the mismanagement of it, and how it has impacted many people both positively and negatively. Investment has always been a very unfamiliar topic to me and as I see my dad’s job primarily working with that concept I’d like to learn more about it.
The main goal is to understand investing, the stock market, cryptocurrency, and managing a budget. The smaller pieces are understanding money and how people spend it, credit cards, scams, and the history of the global market. The project is an introduction to the financial world.
This project will push me to learn about money in a different way than I am used to. In the classroom, I have learned how to add, subtract, multiply and divide money. Now I will be looking at similar concepts but more about what it means to control and manage money. This will help me discover what it means to have control over my own money and how to not mismanage it. Obviously, it will help me further in my adult life as I own a home, car, and insurance but also it will help me understand my own opinions about how people around me spend their money. This project fills the buckets of service, academic, and creativity. For my service, I will continue to work as a teacher’s assistant for 6-8th graders on weekends with Go Project. For my academic piece, I will be learning from books, podcasts, and experts like my father, a portfolio manager at a hedge fund called Maven. I will be experiencing financial literacy as I take on projects like opening and managing my bank account, opening a brokerage account and trading stocks, opening a crypto-wallet, and trading crypto. For my final bucket, creativity, I will be creating a pamphlet for those in my youth group who seek to learn more about what it means to be financially literate as they graduate from high school too. In the end, I hope to learn what it means to be independent, have control over my money, understand how to use it and share that understanding.
I will be creating a pamphlet hopefully at the end of each week that aims to educate those in my community, specifically those in my youth group who attend high school on things like cryptocurrency, stocks, and managing their own money. The concepts I will be learning about are very complex and many authors I have come across are successful not because of their expertise but because of their ability to explain things in the simplest ways possible. Showing things like how to value a company, who to trade a stock to, how to manage one’s finances to other people and my classmates at the end of the year will show to me, at least, that I have successfully understood and mastered these concepts.