Entry 14 - Final Analysis and Reflection

Throughout all of the entries for life stage two, the most important thing that I learned was that life is very expensive if you want to have nice things and that I must take care of where I go for education and of how necessary financial aid and a job will be in taking care of my expenses. For example, the fact that the almost $500,000 I made over the ten years of the budget wasn’t nearly enough to cover all of my expenses for those ten years really caught me by surprise. The reason for my surprise would be that with my budget I am assuming that prices won’t rise, or that my income would drop and that there are probably some expenses that I am not accounting for. Moving on to my entry 12, the total that I calculated for my minimal lifetime earnings wasn’t expected, because most of the descriptors that I come across while researching paleontology always include some variation of the sentence, “You shouldn’t expect to make too much money,” yet I made almost 2.1 million dollars by myself over a period of 40 years. Entry 13’s total expenses, however, were expected because the prices that I used were relatively small and even with future value and inflation being accounted for, the rate at which those prices rose was miniscule, and so the relatively small expenses for the 40 years didn’t come unexpectedly compared to what I spent on in entry 8. However, not accounting for my other possible expenses  really does underestimate how much money I would really be spending over a 40 year period, and so this fact would change my answer to entry 8 because I think that free 1 million dollars would come more handy if I would spend it to pay for a house, since my parent’s home equity funds were really what got me out of dodge for life stage 1’s budget, and with this extra income I’d be better able to save up money for my retirement. Conversely, if I only had 1 million dollars to spend, my answer would be that it is important to look for the smart buys and the great bargains that businesses offer and that if I’m only going to earn 1 million dollars, I wouldn’t get a higher education, because it is evident that either way I’d only have that million dollars to spend so at that point a college education is just a needless expense.