Credit card debt is one of the largest forms of debt in America today. Almost everyone has a credit card today, with some people even having multiple credit cards that have debt piled up on them. This can snowball, and, combined with other debts, can cause quite a lot of problems.

The way a credit card works is that when you swipe your credit card to make a purchase, the money you spent is recorded with the credit card company. At the end of the month, the credit card company bills you all the money you borrowed from them. If you don’t pay it all off, then you incur interest on that sum, and it is added to your bill next month. By not paying off your credit card every month, that debt can snowball and become unmanageable. Credit card rates also change. The best way to avoid credit card debt is to simply not use a credit card, but, if you need to use it anyway, pay off the debt as quickly as you can before the due date.

Credit card debt is different from other debts in that more purchases are made and put on one loan than any other loans. Credit card payments are different every month. Other loans are much more consistent in their payments. Mortgages, vehicle loans, student loans, and other loans have a set payment, or it varies a very small amount based upon changes in interest rates.

In 2023, credit card debt has reached the one trillion mark. That means that the total credit card debt of all Americans added together is over one trillion dollars. This shows that credit card debt has grown exponentially from previous years.

Credit card debt is a large responsibility. So many people have loads and loads of credit card debt that they are unable to pay off. If you are going to have a credit card, make sure that you pay it off before you start to incur interest.

I made no money this week, so I will only be talking about my income for the past year (granted, this is not exact by any means). I don’t have a regular source of income, so I will talk about all the small sources of money I have had since September of last year.

Since last year, I have had a lot of small sources of income. The largest of the these small sources comes from my skills with the 3D printer. Several times over the past year, I have made parts for other people, and have sold them for a small profit, averaging about $20 (this is a guess, I have no actual record). I have also had two business fairs, one in June and one just a couple weeks ago. At the first one I made a good $58, and at the second one I made about $20. My only other monetary gain was from a birthday present I received in March from my Grandparents, and I believe it amounted to $75. That is really all the money I have made, aside from a few small $2-5 jobs I did around this house, of which there were not many. In the next year, I don’t expect too many financial changes, other than I may begin working, and saving all the proceeds to buy a car when I’m older.

I don’t really make a lot of money. I didn’t make any in the last week, but I did make a couple hundred dollars over the course of the last year by some unconventional means.

Plaer printing will be one of two types of businesses. It will either be a sole proprietorship or it will be a partnership, most likely the first. I can upgrade to an LLC in the future if my business prospers enough to warrant it.

Right now, Plaer Printing is a very small business that I formed on my own as a sole proprietorship without really knowing it. I have sold my items at two small business fairs so far, and I hope to open an Etsy store for my products withing a month from now. All that is to say that, right now, I am the only one involved in my business, which classifies it as a sole proprietorship as it stands right now.

I am considering changing my store to a partnership when I open up my Etsy store, but I am probably going to leave it as a sole proprietorship for now. I am not yet ready to incur the risk of becoming a partner, and I don’t really think that I have any need of changing my business to be a partnership yet.

Sole proprietorships group together my personal finances with that of my business, and so it makes it really easy for me to manage. No separate business accounts, separate taxation, or any other complexities. As I am just beginning, I have no reason to have anything more complicated than a sole proprietorship

Sole proprietorship is the right option for my business starting out. There is no reason for me to have any more advanced corporation as yet, but I might upgrade to a partnership if my business takes of, or I might change it to a limited liability company.

Elisha Otis invented the safety elevator. I learned about him in 5^th grade history class from the Ron Paul Curriculum; however, the elevator was not his only invention. In this essay, I am going to talk about Elisha Otis and his journey to his invention of the elevator.

Elisha Otis was born in Vermont in 1811. He left home wen he was nineteen and moved to New York. At this point he worked as a wagon driver. He married in 1834. He had two children with his wife before she died. During this time Otis took part in his first entrepreneurial activity when he invented his own gristmill, which is a type of flour mill. He did not make enough money from this so he tried to turn it into a sawmill, but he met with no greater success than with his gristmill. He then began a business building wagons and carriages, and finally met with some success here. It was at this point that his wife died, leaving him with his two sons and nobody to care for them. He remarried and the left Troy, New York the city of Albany in the same state. He worked for a company that made dolls during this time, but was unsatisfied with the results of only being able to make twelve dolls in one day. Otis invented a machine that could make bedsteads much faster than normally, and his boss set him to using that machine instead of making dolls. Otis again started his own business. This time he invented a brake for steam engines and an automatic oven for bread. These both used steam, and so when his access to steam became obsolete (Albany couldn’t spare the water), he was put out of business. He worked a few other small jobs before inventing the elevator. He was trying to convert an abandoned sawmill into a bedstead factory when he needed a way to move things up and down in the factory. He and his sons designed a “safety elevator” which would catch the elevator box after falling just a few feet. He incorporated it into his factory, and, when his bedstead factory failed, he and his sons started Union Elevator Works which produced and sold these elevators. They later rebranded to Otis Brothers & Co, which still produces elevators and escalators to this day. Otis did not invent much more after this, but enjoyed great success with his elevators. Elisha Otis died in 1861at age fourty-nine.

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about taxes. I’m going to talk about which method of preparing taxes I would chose, and why. I’m also going to talk about tax refund advances. I’m very new to this topic, and I’m sure I don’t understand everything fully, but I’m going to try my best.

I would probably choose to do taxes via a free online application. Because I’m thirteen, and the first time I have to file taxes is probably still a ways off, I won’t have a very complex income, so there won’t be any need to have anything more complicated. (Apparently) Using an online tax application is the easiest way to do it starting out.

Tax refund advances are when you let the IRS take a percentage of your tax refund early. This means that if you are supposed to get a $1000 tax refund, you can get a tax refund advance and the IRS will take a certain percentage (I don’t know what that percentage is) to let you have the money early. If this percentage is 20%, then, using a tax refund advance, you would get $800, but you would get it sooner. Personally, I don’t think I will use a tax refund advance unless I really, really need the money right away, and, if you can avoid it, it is probably not a smart move.

I don’t understand taxes much, but I’ve done my best to give a brief summary of how I (think I) would file taxes, and I also attempted to give a summary of tax refund advances.

I propose a business. It will be an Etsy store where I sell my 3D printed creations. I am only going to start with one product, but will probably expand in the future. I will have some basic marketing, and also some basic operational and organizational principles, but these will not be very complex as of starting. I also discuss startups expenses.

My business will be a very small Etsy store where I sell products of my own creation and manufacture. I will produce these items and ship them to customers when they order them from my online store of the name PLAer Printing.

As of launching, my business will have only one product. These will be my nintendo switch joycon grips, which I have already made some smaller sales on. At launch I will offer five different colors: Red and Blue, Neon Red, Mario Blue, White, Zelda Gold, and Gray. Customers will also be able to pay a fee to have a custom color produced for their particular order. The basic colors will be priced at $25 per pair and custom colors will cost $35. These prices will not be including shipping.

Marketing will be in two main forms: Word-of-mouth and some small ads, in addition to normal Etsy searches. Word-of-mouth is about what you would expect; People talk to each other and one person convinces the other to buy my product. The small ads I referred to would be on the YouTube channel belonging to myself and potentially some friends. I may also participate in some business fairs or craft fairs to help promote my business as well, and I can have a qr code that links directly to my Etsy store, and maybe a promo code to generate some more sales from that fair.

My business will operate quite simply. As I don’t expect to be making a lot of sales at one time, I can simply 3D print my product whenever an order comes in. In the event that my business grows exponentially, I will have, at that point, acquired enough funds to invest into more 3D printers to increase my productivity and speed, and, at that point, I would also produce extra stock, even when I’m not receiving orders, because then I can just pack one and ship it. I will ship my products via USPS priority mail flat rate boxes, which costs $8.55 (I think) to send them anywhere in the United States.

As far as organization goes, I will be the only one in my firm, but I have had a few people say that they have interest in becoming investors, but I do not know how that will turn out, so for now, it’s just me.

Startup expenses will be relatively small for this business. I just need to make sure I have plenty of stock of the filament that I use to make my product, which will probably mean five rolls of filament (which I will set aside from my personal filament for my business). The total startup cost should be about $89.

We talked about many ways for me to record my finances over the course of this weeks. I have decided that the best solution for myself is the humble spreadsheet. I like spreadsheets because they are fairly simple. I am familiar with them. You can obtain free templates that make it perfect for organizing your finances. In addition to having a clean, easy to read spreadsheet, I can also have it automatically add up my total budget, expenses, and other categories without any manual work. Spreadsheets are widely used. If I chose to use Google Docs, I can even access my spreadsheets from any of my devices, on my phone, tablet, desktop computer, and laptop (granted, I don’t have a laptop or a tablet yet). Additionally, if I lose access to my computer for any reason, I still have it saved in the cloud. Spreadsheets are also really easy to print out and make a hard copy of, so that you can put it in your file cabinet. That way, if you lose access to your google password or something of that nature, you still have a copy that you can scan into a pdf. In conclusion, I believe that spreadsheets are the best personal finance tool for me.

In case you are not already aware by the mentions in my other essays, I am big into 3D modeling and printing. I have an Ender 3 Pro that I have done some major and minor upgrades on, including a direct drive mod and a better knob mod, and I am also hoping to install a CR touch and a filament run out sensor. The long and the short of the matter is, I am really good at using my 3D printer and I really care about it. I’ve also made some designs that I know are unique and valuable that I have sold in the past. I run a sort of very small business selling my 3D printed items, and the income is very inconsistent, but I think I could upscale to sell my products online. My two big money making designs are a very simple phone stand and some fairly complicated nintendo switch joycon grips, the most versatile and cheapest of their kind. I can’t say exactly how much I’ve made with these items, but I am fairly certain that I have made at least one-hundred and fifty dollars between the phone stands and joycon grips. I would like to eventually start selling my products online through Etsy, eBay, or maybe my own website, because then I can sell my joycon grips to anyone almost anywhere. In theory, that could be a really successful small business endeavor, and possibly bring in a fairly large amount of income. In conclusion, I think that a 3D printing business could be a profitable and achievable small business that I could potentially start, even at the relatively young age of thirteen. With profits from this business I can also theoretically upgrade my printing setup, and so expand my printing capacity that way.

For my weekly assignment, I was asked to talk about a government regulation that affects interest rates. Inflation is not really a “regulation” but it is something that the government does that affects interest rates; hence I have elected to write about it here.

Inflation is essentially the addition of new money into an already-existing currency, like the printing of new money, or when gold is turned into new coins. Inflation occurs over long periods of time, but (at least right now) is steadily happening, and shows no sign of stopping. Inflation is the devaluation of the dollar. New money, when printed, wasn’t worked for. It is just added into circulation. Here is an example which is much easier to understand: If there are one hundred coins of the exact same value on the entire planet, then each of those coins is going to be worth more than if there were one-thousand of those same coins. When new money is printed, money becomes less rare, and therefore, less valuable. What is the result of this? It costs more money to purchase the same amount of goods. If we were to time travel back in time to 1950 with a modern dollar, we would be able to buy about $12.50 worth of goods because of inflation.

Now that we understand what inflation is, I can tell you about how it affects interest rates. Inflation means that your money looses value over time. If someone put $12.50 in a time capsule in 1950 and someone in 2023 dug it up, that money would have lost a lot of purchasing power, and so essentially that person lost money. It works the same way with loans. If a bank lends someone $30,000 today, and the term is 30 years, that $30,000 will have less purchasing power than if they used it today. This means that banks lose money. The way that they fix this problem is by increasing the interest rate so that it keeps up with inflation. They will end up with more money than they started with at the end of the loan’s term, and, if the rate was high enough, they actually gained money instead of losing it.

That pretty much sums up how inflation affects interest rates. It means that in order to keep banks from losing money, they have to charge more interest on the loan. That is one way that the government affects interest rates.