As graduation approaches quickly, the prospect of greater financial responsibilities is weighing down most of the seniors. Therefore, the Office of Student Development held a seminar to address the issues that students will soon face.

The event, “Your Finances, Your Future,” was run by My Money Workshop. This is a non-profit organization that visits high schools and colleges in order to provide students with a skill set and an understanding necessary to handle their finances.

Their mission according to their website, mymoneyworkshop.com, is “to enable high school and college students to understand and evaluate the many every day money management decisions they will be required to make in the next few years and help them avoid costly and long lasting mistakes.”

Those who attended the event got to hear from guest speaker Dick Yaffa. Yaffa is the founder and CEO of the company and has an impressive list of accomplishments before that. After graduating from both Princeton and Harvard, he and his business partner founded Manhattan Products, Inc. Yaffa grew up in Westchester County and attended New Rochelle High School. He stays involved in the community running programs such as this in order to help students make the best financial decisions.

This particular workshop covered topics such as credit score, credit cards, savings, paychecks and deductions and money and budgeting. Yaffa passed out sheets to the audience that gave an example of a budget and the breakdown of costs on a certain paycheck.

When talking about savings, he went into credit score and 401K’s and how each affects one’s lifestyle. Yaffa also spent a major portion of the workshop talking about the importance of having health insurance. Without it, one could end up owing a lot of money in the case of an accident.

Senior Christopher Sponn brought up the fact that he can stay on his parents’ health insurance until he is 26 under Obama’s healthcare law. He asked Yaffa how much it would cost him if the law gets repealed. Yaffa said around $5,000.

This workshop was beneficial for students because financial matters such as these are becoming more relevant, especially to the seniors, as each one gets closer to entering the work force.

“I thought he was very in touch with the problems that we would be facing going out into the real world,” said sophomore Jaclyn Shearer of Yaffa. “The program was very finely tuned for our age group, which was refreshing.”

Yaffa contacted the school offering to present the program for free and OSD decided to use it in their leadership development series.