Saturday, July 29, 2017

Real Life: This is not a Game: Personal Finance for Young Adults

"Real Life: This is not a Game - Personal Finance for Young Adults" is a learning activity for young people about income and expenses, needs and wants and the jobs and careers needed to pay for daily life and beyond. It introduces kids and young adults to some basic concerns about personal finance: making money, paying bills, and more. 

Real life, hopefully, is full of lots of fun and exciting and special activities and events with family and friends, and just by yourself sometimes. 

But real life happens in the foreground of ordinary daily life. And lots of daily life is pretty ordinary stuff that many people often take for granted and don’t notice: living somewhere, sleeping somewhere, eating, deciding what to wear, not getting too hot or cold, and having some fun and relaxation too, among much more. 

For most adults, daily life happens because they have a job. They go usually somewhere (or they work from home), about 5 days a week, often for about 8 hours a day (or more!), to do work to get paid money so that they can pay for what they need and, sometimes, want for daily life. 

This is a game to introduce young people to what’s involved in daily life, specifically paying for what’s needed for daily life. What people need for daily life isn’t free - they have to pay for it, with money -- and money doesn’t grow on trees: nearly always, people have to work for it. 

This game focuses on expenses of daily living. This game involves a lot of internet research and fact finding: how much do the things required for daily life cost? And how much money does someone typically earn at different jobs? And it involves some basic math: what can someone afford, given a particular income (money earned) at a particular job?

Thinking about these issues, and becoming aware of them, will help you get prepared for thinking about other financial (that is, money-related) questions, specifically those related to college and jobs. Real life is not a game!

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