Financial Fitness by Jannah

Financial Fitness by Jannah - June 2018 Scholarship Essay

In order to graduate, students are required to take a series of two wellness course in their college career. All though these courses are mandatory, the courses you can take to fulfill this requirement is entirely up to the individual. So in a sense, it can be considered an elective.

One of my first wellness courses I decided to take was “Financial Fitness”. I have to admit I was encouraged by a friend take this course with her. I was enticed by not having to do any physical activity to receive to credit. I didn't really know what to expect with this class and I thought it would be an easy one. It wasn’t terribly hard but it was a lot more work than I expected.

Unfortunately, many people are ill informed on their financial matters and aren't smart with their money. Financial ignorance often results in individuals ending up in troubling financial situations. The main focus of the course was to educate students on personal finances, allowing them to become more financially literate and in turn, more ‘financially fit’.

In this course some of the topics that were included were retirement plans, how to compare job offers and their benefits, renting/buying a house and the pros and cons of both, retirement plans and how to save for them, assets/liabilities, creating budgets, the potential dangers of credit cards and how to use them carefully, etc.

Personally, I feel as though this course should really be taught at the high school level not because of the difficulty of the course, rather theses valuable topics need to be introduced earlier in an individual's life.

All in all the content of the was very useful. The professor did state it was more of kind of of a crash course in terms of not everything being covered but more of a launch pad over where to start in their financial independence journey.