15. Making a personal budget.

It’s very important to know how to develop a useful personal budget. It will help you to use your income as effectively as possible. Choices must be made concerning spending and saving. You never know whether you can afford another outing, or a disco, or a concert. What is more, you don’t know if you can afford not to save. So to do that you should keep track of your actual income and expenses for a month.

First figure out all your sources of income and list them. And remember that you should record only your take-home pay as income. You should note all deductions from your pay-cheque. Your second step should be to record how much you spend for food, entertainment, clothing, college supplies, personal care, transportation, and miscellaneous items.

By the way, you should understand the difference between fixed, optional and flexible expenses. Fixed expenses are set in advance and must be paid regularly. Flexible expenses are necessary but change with circumstances. Optional expenses vary and are not always necessary.

Then you can make an expense chart to figure out what percentage of your income is allocated for each item in the chart. Thus you can compare your income and expenses. A consistent item of overspending means that the budget should be readjusted or followed more closely. Obviously expenses should not be higher than income.

16. The value of college education.

An understanding of opportunity costs and tradeoffs is important personally to high school students, as well as everyone else. Sooner or later high school students make choices about what to do after graduation. What is the general relationship between a person’s education and that individual’s earning power? What is a college degree worth? How valuable is post-college schooling? These are the questions that have to be solved nearly by everyone.

Every year millions of students graduate from high school. The decisions they make will affect the rest of their lives. Some will choose to go to college; some will want to get full-time jobs; others will decide to obtain technical job training. In every case, economic reasoning will help students make better choices.

They should consider the costs and tradeoffs connected with a decision to go to college and decide whether a college education is worth the expense in terms of immediate and future personal growth and economic well-being.

The opportunity costs of going to college involve a loss of practical job experience while attending college. The tradeoffs involved in going to college include using time and money now to gain greater advantages in the future.

17. Comparing prices.

What kind? How much? How good? These are the questions that appear every time we go shopping. Being a wise consumer is never easy. A wide variety of prices, brands, sizes and advertising gimmicks influence you when you enter a store. To begin with, take into the consideration that although quality or kind of a commodity contributes to the price, generally the larger the quantity, the less per unit cost. Buying in quantity can often help us spend less. One of the very important factors influencing buyer's decision - advertising. Brands A, B, C have been around for a long time and you trust their names. Brand X, however, has just sponsored a sport event on local television, so you may be more aware of that product. Brand Z is a newcomer, maybe you want to try it. Moreover, advertising also influences what you think about various products. Remember that ads are usually one-sided and emphasize only the good qualities of a product. Ads try to attract consumers by appealing to their emotions. Also the consumer's decision is a matter of personal taste. However, the higher the quality, the higher the price. The decision what to buy and at what price and quality level is a personal one. To sum up, many factors influence buying that smart buyers must obtain product information and them compare and evaluate that information.