Who are you reaching out to about your future? Many individuals and organizations can help you build a better tomorrow and provide information to strengthen your financial future. Even if you feel well-equipped to weather any economic storm, there’s nothing wrong with reevaluating your current situation to ensure that your goals align with where you see yourself heading.
Here are some online resources to help you become and stay money-wise.
Personal Finance and Budgeting Basics
“The single biggest difference between financial success and financial failure is how well you manage your money. It’s simple: To master money, you must manage money,” advises businessman and author T. Harv Eker.
Start with the simplest money matter. You can find a variety of free courses online to boost your knowledge about personal finance and budgeting. Here are nine of them.
- A free five-week course from Purdue University can help you manage money more effectively by teaching you about credit, insurance, retirement, and other personal finance matters.
- A free course from Advance Learning gives you tricks and techniques for better managing your finances. The course takes six to 10 hours to complete.
- A free course from Credit.org offers guidance on how to create a household budget.
- A free one-hour course from Coursera teaches you how to set up a household budget using Google Sheets.
- Udemy’s free “Making Sense of Your Personal Finances” course helps you understand and set financial goals, prepare a budget, save money, and manage your debt.
- Planancial’s free “Future Rich” course drills down into financial strategies and tips through seven-minute videos.
- A free four-week course from Indiana University teaches you how to manage cash and credit.
- Open University’s free “Managing My Money” course promises to give practical guidance on putting together a budget and getting a better handle on spending.
Planning for Retirement
Options for free online education about retirement planning include:
- A free course from Purdue University is designed to help you plan for a secure retirement.
- Brigham Young University’s free course gives you tools to create an educated retirement plan.
- Alison.com’s free “Introduction to Life Insurance and Retirement Savings” course by Khan Academy gives you an in-depth look at types of life insurance, as well as traditional Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and Roth IRAs.
- A SoFi “Saving Money for the Future” video created for Coursera’s retirement planning series teaches you about the importance of compounding growth, the factors that impact goal-setting like retirement savings, and how much money you need to save today to reach future goals.
- U.S. Money Resource’s IRA section of www.usmr.com delivers a great deal of educational resources about individual retirement accounts, one of the most popular ways to set aside money for your golden years.
Building and Diversifying Your Portfolio
The internet boasts a slew of free resources about how to build and diversify your portfolio as well. Here are a few of them:
- A free 1½-hour course from Udemy teaches the basics about the stock market.
- Another free, 1½-hour lecture video from Dr. Jake Xia at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He teaches about portfolio management, portfolio construction, portfolio theory, and risk parity portfolios.
- U.S. Money Resource’s free Gold Information Kit provides a wealth of resources about how to build and diversify your portfolio with the power of precious metals.
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,” said Benjamin Franklin. Invest in yourself today. Check out one of these free online financial education resources and see what you can learn.
