Intended Learning Outcomes
Intended Learning Outcomes:
While we will cover a large amount of information in this class, my overall objectives for you are fourfold. Individually, I want you to:
1. Know what you want to accomplish in life. Write it down. You must individually set your own personal goals and objectives, and write them down. These are your future “yeses” in life so you can say “no” to the daily temptations to spend.
2. Develop and live on a budget. Live within your means. Budgeting isn’t constraining—it is liberating. It helps you to spend your resources on what is important to you—your goals. Set and live by your budget.
3. Pay the Lord first and yourself second. Then save and invest your money wisely. The key is to put your priorities in order—to always pay the Lord first and yourself second. But paying yourself is not sufficient—you must learn to save and invest your money wisely. To do this you must review the basics of investing, invest wisely, and then discipline yourself to set aside and invest a portion of your gross income every month from the day you graduate (and I recommend 20%).
4. Learn to give. If you cannot learn to give when you are poor (which is now), you will never learn to give when you are rich. Someone said “We make a living by what we get, but we build a life by what we give.”Giving is not determined by your money, but by your heart.
The rest of the class is just to help you become wiser financial stewards by giving you the tools to help you make better financial decisions in regards to saving, investing, insurance, tax planning, home and auto purchases, etc. Then once you have developed your own plan, you will have the framework to help you work with and help others.
Since this class is more than a just personal finance class, we need to add to these objectives as many are looking for possible careers in financial planning. In addition, you will:
1. Develop and use a framework for financial planning. This framework, if followed, will help you not only make wise financial decisions and maintain control of your finances, but also give you a framework as you teach others. It’s not what you earn, but what you save after taxes and inflation that makes you wealthy.
2. Use this knowledge and information to create your own Personal Financial Plan. Your personal financial plan is your financial roadmap for life. The better and more thoughtful your financial plan and the more willing you are to follow it, the more likely you will be to achieve your personal and financial goals once you leave this class. This plan, if done carefully and thoughtfully, will likely be one of the most important projects you will complete here at BYU.
3. Develop a methodology to help teach these principles to family and friends. Personal Financial Planning is a key area, not just for students, but also for everyone. My goal for you is not just for you to learn the material, but for you to learn how to teach the material and to assess learning. I want this knowledge to extend beyond the classroom. You will hopefully become the financial experts for your future Wards and Stakes. As such, you will be responsible for part of the teaching in this class, and have the assignment to teach others as well.
Once you have a rough idea of your personal and career goals, we will then work to understand financial management and planning as it is applied to important household and personal topics. The general approach will be to help you to be better and more effective stewards over your resources. To do this we will examine important areas that affect household wealth such as:
1) Measuring financial health
2) Informed budgeting and debt reduction strategies
3) Income tax planning
4) Consumer credit
5) Acquisition of big-ticket items (home, automobiles, and education)
6) Risk and insurance
7) Investment strategies and asset allocation (stocks, bonds, annuities, and mutual funds)
8) Retirement planning, and
9) Estate planning.
While your personal and financial goals will change over time, my purpose is to help you build a framework to help you as you go through your life so that you might attain your personal, family, career, and lifetime goals.