Upgrade Your Budget with Financial Goals and Targeted Savings Accounts

Title: Upgrade Your Budget with Financial Goals and Targeted Savings Accounts

Format: Live In-Person Workshop

Intended Audience: graduate students receiving stipends

Length: 60 minutes

Timing: Year-Round

Live Seminar Outline: Upgrade Your Budget with Financial Goals and Targeted Savings Accounts from Emily Roberts on Vimeo.

Summary: Graduate students face common challenges in their money management. While they may budget and/or track their expenses, their budgets are not maximally effective in helping them reach their goals and weather irregular expenses. This workshop challenges the status quo of each student’s budget by teaching him how to set and reach goals effectively and prepare for irregular expenses. Each attendee is asked to watch a video in advance of attending, bring her budgetary data with her to the workshop, and work through several collaborative exercises during the session.

Outline:

Background Video

• Define and identify values
• Identify current financial stage
• Calculate net worth
• The power of compound interest
• Budgetary data collection and categorization

Workshop

• Goals
  • How to move through financial stages
  • Creating SMART process-based goals
  • Brainstorming bite-sized goals
• Irregular expenses
  • How irregular expenses challenge a grad student budget
  • Identifying irregular expenses
  • The targeted savings solution to irregular expenses
  • Building individualized targeted savings categories, amounts, and timelines
• Adapt your budget
  • Creating a prioritized list of goals and targeted savings
  • Brainstorming how to cut back in budget categories
  • How to weigh uses of money against one another