Throughout my life, me nor my family had the freedom that my peers did. We had always struggled with money with my parents living paycheck to paycheck. The earliest I remember this affecting me was in elementary school, but it has affected me all throughout my life. Although this caused me to struggle more compared to my peers, it has helped me grow as an individual. To start off, I would always hear my peers mention that they were going on vacation somewhere out of state. My family could never afford to take me or my brother on vacations, let alone every year. Additionally, at my elementary school, we had the Scholastic Book Fair every year. All of my peers would come back to class with silly pens and other useless things that costed them $10 or $20 dollars just for two things. While this made me feel left out and alone, it helped me slowly realize that people constantly waste their money easily. This has prevented me from wasting my money too quickly once I got a job. Furthermore, middle school had also affected me. This timeframe is where people start to be urged to join clubs and sports, but I did not have the resources that allowed me to do this. My parents were constantly working leaving no time for me to participate in these extracurricular activities. I missed out on many of the activities that I started doing in high school that I love and will greatly miss in college. Being stuck at home or my parents' work unable to find out what I loved left me depressed and I developed other mental health disorders. In this freetime, I would research a lot of things whether that was mental health disorders, college majors, or places around the world. While I could not experience things for myself, researching about other things helped me realize what I wanted to do with myself as well as grow my education on said topics. Going back to vacations, I never left Ohio until my eighth grade year when our class went to Washington DC. I had to offer services like babysitting, cleaning, and petsitting around my community to earn the money to go on said field trip. This was mainly in the summer of my 7th grade year and I would be away from my house hours everyday. When my parents went to work, they would leave me at someone else's house so I could earn money. I learned how to save money from this because I was not making a lot, but needed hundreds of dollars. Finally, my high school career was affected the most. I persisted in working freelance until my junior year when I could get an actual job. I made a decent amount of money, therefore I was able to participate in the extracurricular activities that I now enjoy. I leared how to be responsible with both time and money and hardly wasted it on things I did not need. When we were required to take Financial Literacy, I realized how much I already knew. Dealing with and saving money was easy for me, especially with my big dreams. I always keep something in mind for why I should be saving. Currently it is for college, however, after college I desire to travel and see the world, without living how my parents did.