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Financial Information for Parents

Keys to Financial Success Vocabulary



THEME I: GOALS AND DECISION MAKING

Resources: anything used to satisfy wants

Scarcity: when there is not as much of a good or service as everyone wants

Trade-offs: giving up one thing to get something else (one person involved, not a trade)

Opportunity Cost: what was given up in a trade-off; the next best use a person could make of resources

Goals: something strongly desired; what one wants to achieve

Values: areas of one's life that a person considers very important

Criteria: a standard for judging those things which are important when making decisions

Costs:that which is given up to obtain or to attain something

Benefits: what one receives as a result of taking an action or making a choice

THEME II: CAREER RESEARCH AND PLANNING

Skills: great ability or proficiency; expertness that comes from training

Talents: any natural ability or power in a specific area

Abilities: power to do something physical or mental

Intelligences: how one acquires, learns, adapts, and retains information and knowledge

Interests: a feeling of intentness, concern, or curiosity about something

Learning styles: how a person organizes and processes information being taken in by the brain

Career: a profession or occupation one trains for and pursues as a lifework

Job: a piece of work done by agreement for pay

Wages: money paid to a person by the hour for working a specific job

Salary: a fixed payment at regular intervals for services

Benefits: those items offered by employers in addition to wages and salary that improve workers' lives

Unemployment: the condition of those workers willing, able, looking for work and cannot find it

Working conditions: the physical, social, and emotional circumstances which form the workplace environment

Derived Demand for Labor: the amount of workers a business is willing and able to hire based on how much demand there is for the business's products or services

THEME III: MONEY MANAGEMENT

BUDGETING

Budget: a plan for spending and saving by accounting for all of one's income

Gross income: amount of money earned before taxes and other payments are deducted

Net income: amount of take home pay left after deductions

Tax: money owed to the government

Deductions: money removed from pay to cover tax payments and other voluntary categories like savings plans

FICA: payments into social security fund

Medicare: payments made into the medicare health insurance system

FWT: federal withholding for tax

SWT: state withholding for tax

Wage tax: levied by a local government on hourly pay

W-4 form: completed form that indicates to the employer how much tax should be withheld

W-2 form: end of year report of all one's earnings from work and the amount of tax withheld

Fixed Expenses: amount of money for the item does not change from month to month (rent/mortgage, insurance, loans, tuition, taxes)

Flexible Expenses: amount of money for the item changes from month to month (transportation, food, clothing, utilities, household maintenance items)

Regular expenses: those items that have to be paid every month

Variable expenses: those items which may or may not have to be paid every month

Discretionary expenses: those items which are not necessary for maintaining a household (leftover after all others are covered)

Savings: money not spent and set aside for future use

Credit: debt used to get goods and services now but payment is due at a later time; reduces amount of money available for future purchase of goods and services and increases cost of what one buys now

Gross income: amount of money earned before taxes and other payments are deducted

Net income: amount of take -home pay left after deductions

Tax: money owed to the government

Deductions: money removed from pay to cover tax payments and other voluntary categories like savings plans

BANKING SERVICES

SAVING AND INVESTING

CREDIT

THEME IV: CONSUMER SKILLS

HOUSING

TRANSPORTATION

THEME V: RISK PROTECTION