Insurance Quotes
In my finance class we have to do a project about what our life will be like ten years after we graduate. Obviously, the economy will be much different and pay will be different and so on, but it was more a project to open our eyes and see how much the cost of living is compared to people's income. For the first part of the project we had to find jobs and include salaries for us and our spouse and decide how many children we wanted and then go online and look up homes (like from actually houses on sale now) and print off one in the town we want to live in one day and then also use a mortgage calculator to see how much we would pay each month (using his generic terms). The other thing we had to do was purchase cars (again from an actual site) and then use a calculator online to figure out how much we would pay each month for the car payments.
For the second part of the project we had to get an insurance quote for each of those things. We had to look up home owners insurance and polices and life insurance and 401K's and retirement plans. We also had to look into care insurance quotes and compare then for each different provider.
Even though this was just a project for class (worth like 80 points all together) and seemed not too hard, it really was an eye opener for a lot of us. I certainly didn't realize how much mortgage payments were or how different insurance companies could vary in prices (I think I found 2 that were 300 dollars apart) even though you use then same information to get the quotes. It is amazing to see how expensive houses are in the area that I live in (I chose to live in the same town, Chicago). And how even though I chose pretty solid jobs for me and my spouse, money was still being stretched it seemed. It is scary to see, but at the same time I think really helpful. I am a true believer in the phrase knowledge is power. I really do think that knowing as much as you can will help you to make better and more informed decisions. By doing this mock life project I got to learn how to compare insurance quotes and search for loans and explore all of my options. If I hadn't done it, I may have figured it out anyways, but now I know how to do it and have the tools to help me in the future.