Money · Foundation

Personal Finance Fundamentals

Most people are never taught how money works. This course covers the handful of ideas that make the biggest difference: where your money goes, how to build a cushion, how debt really costs you, how compounding works for you, and what the evidence says about investing. It is general education, not personalised advice.

What you'll learn

• Audit a month of your own spending and judge a money statistic by what it measures
• Build a budget that survives real life, including irregular income and irregular bills
• Calculate what debt costs, and choose a payoff order using both the arithmetic and the evidence
• Explain compounding, estimate doubling times, and separate real returns from nominal ones
• Compare funds by cost and diversification, and say why the record favours low-cost indexing
• Work out what a salary actually keeps after tax, and tell a marginal rate from an effective one
• Compare taxable, traditional and Roth accounts, read your own plan's match and vesting terms, and order cushion, match and debt
• Decide which risks to insure and which to carry, and compare two policies in a quiet year and a bad one
• Cost owning a specific home against renting one, and find the holding period at which buying wins
• Recognise the three things every scam has to do, rank payment methods by reversibility, and freeze your credit