Effective Budgeting

Budget Assignment

The Jones family is who my group was assigned and it consisted of four people. John, the father, is a top corporate executive who graduated from Yale with an MBA, and makes $150,000 per year. He was married to Mary who is a stay at home mom with a college education. They have two children, an eight year old girl named Susie and a three year old boy named Mark who also happens to have Down 's syndrome. They are the upper middle class, suburban family and live in an exclusive neighborhood in Green Lake. They own a BMW, and are making monthly payments on a 2005 Land Rover and 2003 Mercedes Station Wagon. After giving it some thought I decided to incorporate the Functionalist view of social inequality. I will also include some of William Wilson's theories and how my designated family applies. Lastly I intend to discuss how the members of the Jones' family are able to establish a credible image of self. I anticipate the Jones family will do fairly well for themselves since they are earning a triple digit salary.

In 1945, two sociologists Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore came up with the functionalist perspective on social inequality. They argued that certain tasks in society are more important than others. Just about anyone can do the dishes which is why the "positions of responsibility" call for talented people who are willing to sacrifice a salary right out of high school in order to study and prepare for a higher paying and well respected career. The discrepancies in income are vital to the functioning of society.

John is obviously intelligent since I graduated from an Ivy League school which is why he is making $150,000 a year as a corporate executive. On the other end of the spectrum are the much poorer families that ensure the dirty work is completed and give the wealthy a recipient of the hand-me-downs. Many inner city businesses, such as liquor stores or grocery stores, rely on the poor's patronage to get by. In a sense both groups are similarly important to society and help spur the economy.

Sociologist William Wilson was concerned with race relations in America and introduced the term social class to describe as described by James Henslin "any group of people who have more or less similar goods, services, or skills to offer for income in a give economic order and who therefore receive similar financial remuneration in the market-place." The Jones' are at the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum due to their significant amount of earnings and the type of community that they live in. Although it does not specifically say one way or another, I think that it's safe to assume that the Jones' are Caucasian which also contributes to their higher status. These and more factors produce an abundance of life chances, which are defined as the opportunities one has to experience "the good" things in life. Wilson and his critics agree that a Black child has a much better chance of growing up poor than that of a white kid. Since the Jones' have a hefty sum of money to spend on a monthly budget, they are more than able to create a favorable self image from the expensive cars to the brand name clothes they are budgeted at a steady two hundred dollars a month. Thinking back to class when an unfavorable event was imposed upon our family, the Jones' little girl Susie had lost a tennis shoe and the dog needed a vaccination. We had one hundred and fifty dollars set aside for an emergency fund and since no one needs new clothes every single month and Susie probably has another pair of shoes lying around, need be, they could dip into the family clothes end of the budget to cover any