Personal Finance Project Question?

in this project that we are doing, we have to prioritize our spendings into 9 categories and we had to state what % we spend on that category. some categories are food, clothing, insurance, housing....etc...

i need some ideas of political, social, and economic reasons for financial choices.

examples include:
Political - cleaner environment
Social - no illegal drugs
economical - savings, investing

anyone else got any ideas?????????????

also, i need to hypothetically give advice to a client for a short term and long term decision

example:
short - stay out of credit card debt
long - always save money

any other advices i should add?????????????

any help would be nice
here is a scanned image of what im doing and what i have..

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b134/t...

This is a fairly complicated, involved project so I am going to give you some general advice. One thing you need to be careful of is prioritizing goals in terms of yourself. You always need to consider what is important to the client and what are their goals and objectives. Another potential problem I see is breaking down your expenses by percentage of income. This is directly tied to your level of income. For example - someone making $20,000 a year would be spending $2,400 per year on food in your example. Someone earning $200,000 per year would be spending $24,000 per year on food. The first is probably too low, the second is probably too high. So beaking down the necessary expenses by % of income is impractical in the general sense. It works O.K. when you have a known amount of income and can adjust the percentage to what would be in line for that income level. The higher your income, the smaller the percentage you would be using in each category. The higher your income the more discretionary funds you have available.

When setting goals and giving advice (long or short term) you need to be specific. "always save money" is far too general. Something more like - "Save sufficient retirement funds (assets) to generate 80% of my before tax earnings by age 70. These funds should be able to provide that income for 25 years assuming a before tax return of 7%." That would go a lot further in establishing goals.

"stay out of credit card debit" doesn't give specific parameters. Try - Keep credit card debt to lesss than 5% of annual income and less than 20% of all debt.

The rest of your questions would take longer to answer than what this medium would allow. However, an example of a social reason for a financial choices would be a "Social Responsible" mutual fund that invests only in ccompanies that do not pollute and are active in "green" activities.

This should at least help you get started.

Feel free to give a BEST ANSWER if this was helpful. Good luck and have a great night.