My newest assignment for my commerce class is to write a research paper on estimated cost of living.  We needed to prepare a budget on what the estimated cost of living as a single person, a couple, and a family would be over ten years.

The first thing I looked at was mortgages.  I researched what the average cost of a mortgage was right now and then estimated the increase in mortgage payments over the next ten years.  I did this for three different sizes of houses for the different family sizes.

Then I did the same thing for other major expenses such as car payments, car insurance and home insurance.  The hardest part was estimating the costs of smaller things such as groceries, but I did my best using historical statistics and the average inflation rate provided by the government.

Next, I had to estimate family income.  I used historical statistics again and I used the average salary increases as recently reported in the personal finance news section of the paper for the last twenty five years to calculate wages over the ten years.  Childcare was the last number I had to come up with for the project.

What I came up with is that I need a good mark on this paper and in this class, so I can afford to live in ten years.