Assessment : Financial Budgeting

In this module, you have created a realistic personal budget that includes costs for education, savings,
housing, transportation, food, and other items. You have considered the how and why of staying (or getting)
out of debt, building credit, and saving for short and long term expenses. For your assessment, please show
that you have considered carefully all these items.

Part I: Net Salary

1. Please explain what you see as some of the benefits and challenges of creating and sticking to a budget.
The possible benefits may include: wouldn’t run out of fund, help guide you through your money spending
process, help you realize how much you can actually spend and what kind of life you can afford.
Challenges may include: actually trying to follow your budgeting plan(especially savings and “wants”),
emergency events where it require more money than you have in your saving account.

2. Using the budget you created in the module as a guide, explain at least five items that should be part of a
budget and provide a brief explanation of why these items are important to include.
Monthly grocery, housing, savings in saving account and for pension, insurance, your “wants”. Housing and
food are the basic needs one need to at least survive and furthermore. Savings, pension, insurance is your
social safety net which you can use when retired or accidents occured. Finally, “wants” are what people use
to entertain themselves, which is an very important aspect that cannot be ignored. People need to relax after
a day of work.

Part II: Savings Strategy

3. Using the budget you created in the module as a guide, explain why someone would save every month for both
short term and long term expenses. State how much is reasonable every month to save according to your
personal budget.
As I stated above, it’s because savings provide a social safety net, that can help you when something happens
to you or you are retired.

Part III: Surplus or Deficit

4. In the end, does your budget end with a surplus or a deficit?
I put all remaining money into wants and the balance ended up on exactly 0, reasons, again, are stated above.

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 5. What decisions did you make about your budget that led to that final outcome?

NOTE: If your budget ended with a deficit (you were spending more than you were taking home each month),
this is not sustainable. You would need to redo your budget until your net income covers all of your monthly
expenses.

Choosing a mediocre housing condition and grocery budget, where I can put enough money into
entertainment so that I can actually do something with it, while maintaining a fair amount of savings.

Part V: Summary
6. Identify two lessons you learned by completing this salary-based budget.

- You budget is stricter than you might think, especially after tax and insurance. I really had troubles
trying to plan out a life I want with what money I had to work with.
- You need to “pay yourself first,” that made budgeting much easier than to figure out what % of
remaining should I put into savings after all of those other things.