Finance Your Money

This week, we learned about how to financing your money. 

some methods to finance your money:

• Installment plan
• layaway (ask for store to keep your stuff you want to buy, and pay certain amount of money in every month/year etc.)
• Secured and unsecured loans. 

Some sources of financing are:

• retail stores
• banks and credit unions
• finance companies
• pawn shops
• payday loans (evil)
• title loans (evil)
• private lenders

Some types of credit are:

• open-end credit
• closed-end credit
• service credit
• revolving credit
• secured loans
• unsecured loans

There are many methods, sources of financing, and types of credit, but each one of them has some pros and cons. Therefore, it is important to have researches on them before you use them, and pick right method, source and type for you.

We also learned about a credit card. We all know about a credit card but we don't know what systems a credit card exactly has. There are many benefits but also costs by using a credit card. If you know exactly how to use it, it is totally useful to have. But if you don't know how to use it, it can hurt you really bad!Remember that a credit card is not a free money! If you use it to buy something, you have to pay back! Therefore, the lessons that we learned this week are really important and helpful in the future, or even now!

Again, what we learned this week are really important and helpful. Fortunately, I don't have any credit cards with me, so I don't need to worry about it right now, but I probably will have one in the future, so I am glad to have this class (:

How To Save Your Money?

This week, we continued learning about banking, but we more focused learning on BUDGET. We learned how to financial our money. Since we are still high school students, and many of us live with our family, we still don't get an idea of how to save money and why it is important to save money, or study about personal finance. On Thursday, we watched the movie about how people save their money and tips of saving money. I learned many things from the movie, but at the same time, I started concerning about my future. Can I make enough money to live in the future? Can I financial my money by myself in the future? 
In the movie they say that it is important to: 

• save your money NOW
• think difference between NEEDS and WANTS
• choose right bank for you
• check credit report every year
• get retirement plan, student loans and health insurance
• think carefully before using credit card and buying stuff
• think about future
• ask for help when you need to 

etc...

I learned really important lesson from the movie, and I want to think more about financial plan for my future. 

Reflection Of This Week

This week, we finally get into Personal Finance! First topic we've studied is Money & Banking. 

We all have money in our life, but if we think about difenition of money, it's hard to tell, isn't it? MONEY is any good that is widely accepted for the purposes of exchange and in the repayment of debts. So money can be anything unless it is 1)stable in value 2)scarce 3)accepted 4)divisible 5)portable 6)durable 7)difficult to counterfeit. To get used to this topic, we created our own island, and made our island's resources and money. We also discussed how to trade money each other.

After we learned about money, now we have started learning about banking. Banks makes money by charging interest. Banks are the safest place to save our money in! We didn't really learn much about banking this week though, we made our own banking account in our class. We learned how to set checking acount, how to check money, how to deposit or pay money, etc.

I really enjoyed the class this week, because I could learn how to set a bank account. I think what we did in class this week will be really usufule in the future because as we get an adult, and become independent from our parents, we will difenetly have to know these things. I really look forward to learn more about them in the class next week!

What we learned this week

So this week, we learned how to measure economic activity. This includes GDP, Inflation, Standard of living, and Business cycle etc. We also did the chart that compare GDP, unemployment rate, debt, inflation rate, population under poverty line etc, of 10 countries. The chart helped very much to understand how well countries do in economy. It's surprised me that GDP and unemployment rate and population under poverty line are not proportional. I used to think that if GDP of a country is high, then unemployment rate and population under poverty line are low. But this is not what I thought. For example, U.S. has the highest GDP among Canada, Australia, German, France, Italy, China, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea. However, U.S. unemployment rate and population under poverty line are also third highest among these countries. 
This week's lessons were kinda hard for me to understand all, but I hope I can get all before a test on Friday! 

Competition

Finally, midterm exams are over! 

Good Job You Guys :D

This week we covered fun topic which is competition!

When we hear about a competition, we usually think of bad thing happening. However, competition in market economy gives us the best possible product at the best possible price. So, we definitely need a competition in our market economy! 

There are four types of competition.

Perfect Competition: ex) agriculture  

• Standardized products
• Numerous buyers & sellers
• Freedom to enter & exit the market
• Independent buyer & sellers
• Well-informed buyers & sellers

Monopoly: ex) cable company 

• Least competitive of all market structures
• Characteristics of Monopoly
• only one seller
• Restricted, Regulated Market by government
• sellers control prices

Monopolistic Competition: ex) cheeseburger 

• Many sellers and many buyers
• Similar but differentiated products
• Limited control of price (sellers control the price): most of prices are the same.
• Freedom to enter and exit market

Oligopoly: ex) cereal company 

• Few sellers and many buyers
• Standardized or differentiated products
• More control of prices
• Little free to enter or exit market

In our economy, I think Monopolistic Competition is the most fit-able. I think so because it's competitive but not as competitive as the Perfect Competition, there is a freedom to enter and exit the market, and there are many sellers and many buyers. I believe that competition is important to keep up our economy better and better. Therefore, I don't think monopoly and oligopoly are good idea. Even though the Perfect Competition is the ideal model of a market economy, I think this is not good idea either, because all products are standardized which means we all have to have the same goods and services. Therefore, in my opinion, the Monopolistic Competition is what our economy need.

what we learned this week!

This week we learned about supply. Supply is a the willingness AND ability of producers to offer goods and services for sale. Law of supply is opposite to law of demand that producers are willing to sell more of a good or service at a higher price than they are at a lower price. 

We also learned about 6 factors that change supply curve.

• input cost = supplier’s costs increase
• labor productivity = increase productivity/decreased costs
• technology = better technology can improve technology
• government actions = can help or hinder production
• producer expectations = future prices affect production
• number of producers = more producers = more product

We also learned how to create production costs and revenue schedule.

It was a little bit hard for me to understand how to create the schedule. However, I think this is important to know how to create it and also how to see it because it helps us to know prices of products that producers want to put. It also helps us to know what price we should put when we sell something.

Tripling tobacco tax 'could prevent 200 million early deaths'

This week, we learned about demands and elasticity in class. Today I want to talk about elasticity using tobacco as an example.

Tripling tobacco tax 'could prevent 200 million early deaths'

published January 2, 2014/Reuters

Researchers said on Wednesday that tripling tobacco tax globally would cut smoking by a third and prevent 200 million premature deaths this century from lung cancer and other diseases. In a review in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists from the charity Cancer Research UK (CRUK) said rising taxes by a large amount per cigarette would encourage people to quit smoking altogether rather than switch to cheaper brands, and help stop young people from taking up the habit, and it would affect not only in poor countries but also rich countries. Since tobacco kills almost 6 million of people a year, it will be good to put higher tax on tobacco as soon as possible. 

I agree with this article because in class I learned that products that are not necessity for people tend to be elastic, and tobaccos too are not necessity for people. Putting high taxes on tobaccos can make more opportunities for people who smoke to think whether or not to stop smoking because it will surely hurts their "wallet." However, I don't think only putting high tax on tobaccos is good way to cut people smoking, but making people aware how dangerous smoking is for our health is the first thing we need to do in order to cut people smoking.

The Article  <-- link to the article