Entry 23: Reflections

Part A:

1. Marriage
1. When I started to put the budget for the wedding together, it changed my perspective of the matter because before doing this part of Life Stage 3 I thought that all weddings were probably really expensive events. However, this perception was shattered because I realized that while a wedding in general is still very expensive, I found that it is entirely possible to knock down your wedding’s cost. An example I have of this, was the second day I spent looking online for a place to rent to host the wedding reception. On that day I found a few real life couples talking about their wedding on a forums website, while I don’t remember the exact cost they said, I can say with confidence that they said that they spent about $9,000-$12,000 on their wedding. Another paradigm changing experience that I had was when I calculated the total cost of my honeymoon. A reason why that experience changed my perspective on honeymoons was that I found that California has a quite a few neat places to go for honeymoon opposed to my old perspective of honeymoons being spent solely on tropical beaches. In fact, it really surprised me to learn that Ireland is a popular spot for honeymoons, when I came across a few top 10-40 lists online.
2. Family
1. A perspective change that I went through with this part of Life Stage 3 was that I realized for the first time in my life that actually buying a house seemed like a lot better of a choice than renting an apartment. Before doing this part of this life stage, I thought that even if you had a family that getting an apartment would be cheaper over time since I thought rent was supposed to be small. After comparing the figurative house and apartment that I looked into for this part of the component, I now know just how much cheaper a house is over time compared to an apartment if you could keep yourself at a good credit range.
3. Credit and Debt
1. One experience that I gained knowledge from by doing the credit and debit part of Life Stage 3 was when I was researching the student credit card that Discover had. While researching the card, I found that it didn’t have too large of an APR and that it gave me various rewards for using it and that I could actually use the card to help me buy things like college textbooks or perhaps a laptop. Also, I found that using cards like this while I am young to set up a good credit history can eventually help me when I’m older to get low rates when I buy a new car or even a house.

Part B:

Overall, I really thought that Life Stage 3 could’ve been improved on by continuing our budgets from Life Stage 2, because I felt that I didn’t really grasp how to budget too effectively and with Life Stage 3 that I’d make better choices and perhaps learn tips or tidbits about bringing myself out of my graduate school debt. On an individual basis, I would’ve prefered that the marriage part of the Life Stage 3 would’ve given us a random partner with a personality type that complimented ours, that way I could have found a more realistic wedding and honeymoon spot that fit both of our economic means. Also, I would’ve liked to dive more into the family history part of this section perhaps taking the accounts of several parents and synthesizing those conversation into an answer as to what kind of a parent do I plan on being. Despite all of my criticisms, I think that overall Life Stage 3 as is really did teach a whole mess of things that I didn’t know about such as APR and the type of personality that best compliments mine.

Just a few quick side note, I really did think that the credit and debt part of Life Stage 3 was really cool because I actually was given the chance to look into several different credit cards, but I’d like to add that perhaps that our general credit card options should’ve been limited to student credit cards since those are the type credit cards that my fellow peers and I will be running into in the future if we decide to pursue a higher education.