A Few Study Habits for Students

A Few Study Habits Darnell Wright for Students Make Time to Study

As a student, you’re always juggling responsibilities. Your time is limited and what you focus on expands. That’s why it’s important to better manage your energy and priorities.

Create a Study Schedule

If you want to learn something, you need to space out your study time. Spacing it out then helps store the information into your long-term memory.

Design Your Study Space Organize Your Study Time

You have the planner that’s helping you stay organized. Every Sunday night, I’d set aside time to plan out my week, and get back on track with organizational habits. Then I’d block the days and times when I’d plan to work on assignments and for what classes.

You want to find a space with no distractions, a place you like, somewhere that’s comfortable (but not too comfortable), with natural lighting.

Take the Best Study Notes

I recommend getting clarification on anything that you don’t understand as soon as you can. You wouldn’t want to go into an exam or assignment and be confused because of how someone else studies.

Get Study Help

Your school has many resources you can use to get the answers you need.

Financial Literacy Games & Courses

Financial literacy can be a confusing concept to understand, there are so many topics to discuss such as avoiding scammers, investing money, saving, debt, loans, insurance, etc. And the worst thing that can happen is that you learn about it through a negative real world experience. Falling into debt because you do not know where your money is going or getting tricked by a scammer is the last way you would want to learn about improving personal finance and financial safety. If you want to know what to expect and how to handle financial situations in the real world before they happen, you should test out game simulators that will help improve your knowledge. These games go over any topic you can think of pertaining to financing and scammers.

Left to Right: Spent; Shady Sam; Lights, Camera, Budget!

Shady Sam

Shady Sam is a game designed to demonstrate how loan terms can hurt you if you do not pay attention. This game is presented by NGPF who is revolutionizing the way financial literacy is taught to improve the financial lives of the next generation. Shady Sam comes with worksheets: Categorizing Credit, Understanding Amortization, FICO Credit Scores, and Impact of Credit Scores on Loans.

Lights, Camera, Budget!

“Lights, Camera, Budget!” Was made to help educate middle school and high school students on financial literacy topics and budgeting skills. Students play as a movie producer who has been given 100 million dollars to produce a movie. The student’s objective is to prove that they have good personal finance skills to stay on their budget.

Money Magic

Money Magic is a game that is centered on budgeting, the players goal is to help “Enzo” manage his budget and reach his savings goal to make it to Vegas. This game is also presented by NGPF. NGPF has 9 other financial literacy games that take less than 20 minutes to complete.

Spent

Spent is an interactive budgeting games that shows you the stress of living paycheck to paycheck. This game challenges you to make through the month given the circumstances thrown at you. This game is presented by NGPF.

Everfi Financial Literacy Course

This course goes over multiple financial topics such as opening a bank account, employment & taxes, learning their budgeting personality, making every day purchases such as cars and houses, understanding credit cards & credit scores, different higher education options, risk management strategies and precautionary measures, and the roles of different insurance. This course has 7 lessons to complete.

Banzai!

Banzai! Provides interactive financial literacy courses that teach skills such as budgeting, saving, understanding debt, and using the internet safely, etc. This is a free site that educates children, teens, and adults. Shayla McClendon

SHOULD BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS SHOULD BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS

Money is an important part of global culture and is one of the main motivators behind why we go to work. No one wants to work for free after providing their services to a corporation, people want to be paid for their labor, especially in the economy we are living in. According to Study in US, if you are living in America you would have to budget $1000-$1500 a month for housing and utilities. The annual spending average on food in 2020 according to Bureau of Labor Statistics was $4,942. Due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, the CPI (Consumer Price Index) inflation rate has risen to 8.6 percent in May 2022, the highest in 40 years, as stated by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Meeting financial goals is a struggle for most people because they do not know basic financial literacy skills. Milkeninstitute.org states that Adults with low financial literacy spend an average of 12 hours per week dealing with personal financial issues versus those with high financial literacy spend 3 hours per week. If financial literacy were a common part of school curriculum, there would be over 57 percent of Adults in America who have financial skills and knowledge.

BENEFITS

PISA (Program for Internationalist Student Assessment) reveals that many high school students in the US are illiterate in financial knowledge and skills. On a 1,000-point scale, the average score for US students was 506, a low scale that has been resistant to progress. If financial literacy was taught from the age children can enter school and graduate from high school, by the time that they are young adults they will be adept in money management skills and knowledge. They would also be confident in knowing that they can make strong financial decisions as it would become second nature.

OUTCOMES

Financial literacy can encourage students to start saving early and build their savings accounts, and by the time students enter early adulthood, they would have accumulated $1,000 dollars or more in savings. Students may also become interested in exploring stocks and investing their money to generate a source of income of their own. With success students should also be knowledgeable on the importance of insurance, credit, consumer protection, investor protection, how to pay taxes and other topics that focus on finances.

LONG RUN

With students having financial skills and knowledge hopefully they can live the rest of their lives without financial stress and grow their wealth. They may also pass on their knowledge and skills to others who are just starting their financial journeys or to people who are working on fixing their financial situations.

According to ngpf.org, currently 8 states have guaranteed standalone personal finance courses for all high school students in 2022. And 15 states have made it mandatory to take a personal finance course before graduating.

Shayla McClendon

Investing into Stocks

(Show Me the Money)

What are stocks? A stock indicates that the holder has some ownership in the company. People buy stocks to get a small piece of the company’s profit. For example, if you were to invest fifty dollars into your favorite company, your fifty dollars could turn into one-hundred dollars and so on.

What are the pros and cons of stocks? The amount of return you receive in stock depends on how well the company you chose is doing, remember if the company you invested in is profiting you will too. Companies can also suffer financially, and the money you have been investing can be taken away. According to Investopedia, companies fail due to not investigating the market, business plan problems, too little financing, bad location, remaining rigid, and expanding too fast.

To safely invest, know what company you want to support and how many. If you are a beginner or a teenager, according to The Balance, pick one or two stocks and learn how to follow and evaluate individual stocks, consider picking companies you are familiar with. Companies to investigate for beginners would be Nike, Amazon, Disney, and Microsoft. Determine whether your top picks are good investments and would it be risky to invest money into these companies? Cash App, Plynk, and Robinhood are great downloadable sources for doing research while you invest.

There are three risk levels when investing into stocks, minimal risk, medium risk, and elevated risk. A minimal risk investment means that your investment will not be at stake, but there will also be less to gain and losing profit would not be devastating. A medium risk investment means that your investment is potentially at stake, but there will be more to gain and lose. An elevated risk investment means that there is a fifty-fifty chance of devastating loss, but the profit you can earn will be exceptionally large. To avoid losing your profit, it is a clever idea to invest your money in multiple companies instead of one. If you place all your money into one company, there is a chance that the company will plummet, and it will take your profit with it. So be careful and aware of your decisions, and if you need help making them seek professional assistance.