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 This project has been exciting, challenging, and rewarding. We have learned many valuable lessons that will help us as we embark on the next chapter in our lives. For Kennedy and I, this means starting college and living on our own. Granted, we will not be paying rent, clothing a child, or paying off a car loan, but we will be furnishing a dorm room, purchasing college apparel, and paying to attend numerous social outings. Therefore, the lessons this project has taught us will become crucial. These lessons include:

 

1. Everything is really expensive

Over the course of this project we realized that nothing is cheap and it all adds up really fast.
Our furniture, for example, took up way more of our saving than we had originally expected; however, most if not all of the purchases that we made for our house were absolutely necessary. Realizing that living on your own is expensive is important to learn for a variety of reasons. One being that if we want these things, we are going to have to work hard to earn money, spend time saving money, and work on maintaining a budget.

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2. Monthly income is less than expected

We never expected that both of us having a $40,000 a year job would leave us with such a small combined monthly total. After everything (taxes and bills ext.) are taken out of your original budget, there is way less than what we expected to have for the rest of the everyday things that we wanted.

 

3. You cannot always have everything that you want

With such a small monthly budget, we had to learn that we could not always get everything that we wanted. We had to cut back on a lot of the items that we wanted because we had to buy the things that we needed before we could buy the things that we wanted. We ran out of money very quickly just by buying the things that we really needed. For a few of the things that we really wanted, we had to start saving for them. With lots of hard work and saving, we can eventually get some of the things that we want, but this will take time.

 

4. Budgets are important

At the beginning of this project, we were not very concerned with our budget. We just assumed that all the numbers would work out in the end. This, however, was not the case. Towards the end of the project, we had to go back and modify some of our original purchases. In real life, it would be hard to go back after the purchases are already made. Therefore, we learned that budgeting in advance is the way to go.