Essay question responses and analysis

Time Management

One way in which a person could and should engage in better time management is to plan out one's day in advance of it beginning. Rather than having a list of tasks that have to be done and no firm timeline as to when they will be done or what order they will be done in, there should at least be a prioritization of what is most important and what is least important. If possible, there should be an estimation of how long each job will take. If this is done precisely enough, this could be used to plan out how the day will progress from an order and task standpoint. For example, if there are two tasks and they will take about four hours each, then one task can be done in the morning, then the person could go to lunch and then the second task can be done during the afternoon half of the day. In general, knowing what needs to be done and roughly what times those tasks could and should be done is most of the battle. Any tasks that are time-specific should obviously be mapped to the proper time slots (Psychology Today, 2015).

Debt vs. Expense

The term for an amount owed to another part is indeed a debt. However, the question asks what the difference is between a debt and an expense. The answer to this is actually quite simple. When one is speaking of a debt, this will typically be when one person (person A) borrows from a second person (person B) to pay a third person (person C). For example, if person A wants to buy a car, they might borrow the money from person B. And use the borrowed money to pay person C. The difference with an expense is normally two-fold. First, an expense is something that is pre-known and recurring, typically. For example, a water bill for one's apartment would be an expense as would the rent payment itself. This does not mean that would never incur a debt (loan) to pay that bill, but it is still an expense whether the money used to pay for the expense comes from wages earned for a job or from a third party that loans the money. In the event that, for example, money is loaned by one person so that another person can pay their rent, the money owed back to the person who loaned the money would be a debt. The rent paid to the landlord would be an expense. Another example of a debt is when a bank loans money for a person to buy a car. Again, there's three parties involves and it's not a "normal" recurring expense like a water bill or rent. People do not normally take out loans to pay recurring bills (Brewer, 2007).

Personal Budgeting