[SOUND] Well, congratulations. You've made it this far. This week, we're going to focus on how we put everything we've talked about this semester together, in one cohesive plan. So, what an accomplishment. We're going to focus by understanding how these things relate to each other. The different personal finance concepts, and talking about what we want to focus on for just this final project that we're doing in this class. So I want to take us back, to the way back, in terms of understanding a little bit about financial security once again. In this class we've dealt with understanding a little bit about cash and credit management, about wealth accumulation, about understanding how to protect out resources as well as our ourselves, and how that is what we can control, with respect to achieving financial security. Throughout the time we've talked a little bit about how the economy can effect these, and we talked about things like wealth management or interest rates for debt. We certainly understand how our lives can be related to this as well, how our preferences and needs change over time, and hopefully, over the course of the semester, we've addressed this, the access. The fact that we know a little bit more about where to deal with these different financial services and tasks we have, and we have some awareness of the different services and tasks that we need to be engaging in to successfully manage our finances. So we're going to go piece by piece by each one of these, and take a look and remind ourselves, what were some of the key takeaways that we want to put in to this final project. Let's begin. So remember, when we talked about cash, one of the most important things that we talked about was that a budget is the key to success. And having a budget that we can stick to, that's realistic, that works for us, is going to be very important. From this point forward, we can thinking about that that's a lot of control we can take over our own lives and over our own finances. So we put together a budget for this year, that's the thing we want to kind of try and accomplish. We tracked our spending for a little bit. We put together and thought, what's our budget going to look like for a month. We want to think about, for the next year, what does this look like? How do our goals that we might have set? Factor into our budgeting choices. So do they affect the amount of money we're going to spend? Does it affect the amount of money we're going to save? And then very importantly over the next five years how is our budget likely to change. Now we don't have to deal with everything that's anticipated, all the possible outcomes, but thinking about based upon what we think our life looks like over the next five years. What will our budget look like? Will our family dynamics change? Will our location or residence change? Will we be staying put? Will our budget look very much the same? But giving some sense of that helps us to start making and thinking strategically about our finances and our spending as well as our savings. So that's a little bit of what we want to see about on the cash analysis side. With credit management, we certainly want to get a sense too, about what strategic reasons there will be, for, for, using credit this year. What about, over the next five years? So, how and where and when will we have these? What will be our system for checking our credit report, three times a year? Remember, the Fact Act allows us to do that, pull it from each of the three credit reporting agencies. How are we going to have a reminder for us, for that? Will we put it on our calendar? Will we just remember because we know it's so important? But thinking about that. And what will be our general plan for, how we protect our own identity? What types of things will we do? And how will we enhance our credit score, over time? Regardless of where our credit is, chances are, it's not perfect. So what are the things we've learned that we know we can do to enhance our overall credit rating and credit score. We'll pepper some of this with respect to cash and credit by reminding ourselves a little bit about our overall ratios and the health of our finances. Do we have too much debt and what's our debt reduction plan going to look like as well. And we'll certainly look at how we're managing with the effectiveness of our cash. So cash and credit management go hand and hand and we'll be seeing those as part of our final project. Then we move on to savings. What are our SMART Goals? And what's our plan for paying ourselves in the next 2-3 years? Remember that, and in the next 5-10 years? Savings is really this act of how we don't spend the money today and how we make sure that we put it aside for the future. So how will we do that? Will we use things like payroll deduction. Will we use tax deferred accounts that do automatic debits? Will we do automatic transfers at our bank? There's many different mechanisms we have. But remember those three keys to savings. We had to set a plan, set a goal, make a plan, and save automatically. So, we want to make sure we kind of get to that. And here we have our goal setting and how we want to automate our savings. We then think a little bit about investing for our future as well. What types of accounts match up to our goals? How are we going to access these accounts? And what type of asset allocation will we use with respect to, will we want growth, or will we want income, will we want cash? And what's the tax implications of some of these decisions? That's another piece of the puzzle, with the types of accounts we have, will there be taxes generated every year from our investments? Our we being strategic from a tax wise standpoint, as well as of course from an investing standpoint. Then of course we come to managing our personal risks. So for each of these major types of risks we have, Income Earning Potential, Personal Well Being, Personal Possessions, and our Financial Wealth, what risk management strategy will we use to handle each exposure? Will we assume the risk, retain it? Will we transfer the risk or share it with an insurance company? Will we avoid the risk? Will we reduce the risk? So remember we have those major mechanisms we had, and for each of these types of personal risks we face to our financial security. What will we do? How will we manage them? Some of them, the answer might be, nothing right now. It might be, in 5 years we have something we need to do. But we just want to give that some thought so that we know that we've made a determination for it. It's okay if the right answer is do nothing right now, that sometimes is the right answer. But it at least means that we've thought about it and came to that conclusion rather than just ignoring it. That's what we don't want to do with personal finance. So remember, for each of these for this final write up, including our discussion on taxes, there's a provided template, a suggested outline for what you want to follow in Word, and you want to make sure that you utilize that in putting the plan together so that you don't miss any of the great pieces that will hopefully help you continue on the path to financial security. Thank you.
