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Gaining control of your financial life is one of the most important and difficult things you need to accomplish. The array of products and advice offered by the financial services industry is complicated and can be overwhelming. However, at the end of the day, you have to take ownership of educating yourself to make better financial decisions.
Hundreds of books and courses promise to help you navigate the maze. It’s hard to know where to turn and, most important, how to get started.
I am fortunate for the opportunity to be exposed to some of the brightest and most innovative minds in finance. Last year, I attended a presentation by Terrance Odean, a finance professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley. Odean is a behavioral finance guru, having studied under the 2002 Nobel laureate in economics, Daniel Kahneman.
However, what makes Odean particularly interesting and insightful is the circuitous and unconventional journey he took to the top of academia. Not only has he driven a taxi in New York City, he dropped out of college five months before graduation before finally earning a bachelor’s in statistics from the University of California Berkeley 19 years later.
Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, are free classes aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the internet, many offered by some of the top universities on the planet. Odean spoke of a personal finance course he was developing that would soon be available on the edX platform, “How to Save Money: Making Smart Financial Decisions.” Register at bit.ly/makingsmart.
The course covers five weeks, each on a specific topic. Each week/topic contains “core,” as well as “optional,” videos. Additionally, for each week/topic, there is a Your Financial Reflections section with questions to probe how what you learned that week affects you, a Readings and Resources section with links for those wanting to take a deeper dive, and a Weekly Quiz.
Week one is “Spending and Saving,” covering spending, budgeting and setting financial goals.
Week two is “Credit, Debt and Taxes,” covering the importance of your credit score, how it is calculated, how to improve it, viewing your credit report, and income and a variety of other taxes.
Week three is “Insurance,” covering how it works, why wills and health directives are important, and why you should have disability insurance. The optional sections cover health insurance and deciding which types of insurance you need.
Week four is “Investing,” covering allocating your assets between domestic stocks, international stocks and bonds, and how that changes as you get older. The optional sections discuss “Investing in Risky Markets” and “Advertising to Investors” and are particularly timely.
Week five is “Planning for the Future,” covering aging and financial decisions.
When I asked Odean why he created the course, he said, “Over the years, I’ve observed that many of my friends were uncertain or confused about how to invest their savings, whether they were saving enough, dealing with debts, or getting the right insurance. I was asked if I would be willing to teach a free online course about personal finance and thought that this would be a great opportunity to help people to help themselves. I’ve tried to keep the course simple, basic and practical.”
Mission accomplished!•
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Kim is the chief operating officer and chief compliance officer for Kirr Marbach & Co. LLC. He can be reached at (812) 376-9444 or mickey@kirrmar.com.
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