The Cost of Living in Paradise Redux

I spent quite a few of my formative years in Honolulu, Hawaii and only moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when I started high school. The middle school project that I remember most clearly was named "The Cost of Living in Paradise". The Hawaiian Islands is often addressed as paradise, but the cost of living on these islands is very high and so our sixth grade English teacher wanted us to learn about the financial burdens our parents go through. The project worked like the following:

1. We all picked an educational degree out of a hat.

2. We all picked a marital status out of a hat.

3. We all drew the number of children we had randomly.

4. "Married" people were paired up with partners.

5. We had to look in the newspaper classifieds for jobs according to our educational degree. (This was 12 years ago and online job ads were not very common)

6. We had to find housing in the newspaper. (no craigslist yet!)

7. Then based on the pay rate of our "jobs" we set up a budget and calculated how much money we have left at the end of the month.

8. Finally we had to create a poster with all the classfied ads we found and present our budget, and tell the whole class what the cost of living in paradise is.

This is how my fate in paradise turned out. I had a high school diploma and I found a job as a carpet shampooer paying $2000 a month. I was married, and my "husband" happened to be my best friend, who had an associates degree in the culinary arts so he found a job as a chef paying $37,000 a year. It was pretty funny because he was a chubby boy and the whole class laughed and said they could see him as a chef (in reality he is in law school now). Fortunately, we had no kids. The few details I remember about our budget is that our rent was $700 a month, and we had one car and I took the bus to work because public transit is very abundant on the island. We also only budgeted $20 a month for entertainment. In the end we had about $760 left in savings every month.

It sounds so childish when I write about it now, but I remember being very proud of that project because we had the most savings out of the entire class even though we weren't graded on our savings amount. Some kids budgeted $400 a month for entertainment and $600 a month for clothes and ended up with 0 dollars for savings, and some of the "single" kids said it wasn't fair that they had less money. Some of the presentations were quite funny,too. For example, a boy explained that he needed to use a lot of money for entertainment to buy the things his parents didn't buy for him. The takeaway from that project was 1) stay in school to get better paying jobs 2) budgeting lets you see how much you can spend 3) Hawaii is expensive. I don't think the lesson got through to everyone, but it was still a worthwhile exercise. It is probably the only personal finance lesson I actually had in school, and that's why I remember it so well. Now that I am really married and working I think I am a little less frugal than my 12 year old self, but I still manage to save a lot with the hubby. On a side note, I sincerely hope the spendthrift kids in my class aren't living in the zero savings budget they drew when they were 12. Anyway, I think this project can be replicated anywhere with any literate kid and a few newspapers. Of course, it is a lot more fun with more kids in a classroom.