Personal finance 101
Intro
Financial literacy becomes more and more important when you grow up. Unfortunately, most education systems today, at least the ones that I know of, don’t teach it. It’s something that you figure out on your own if you’re interested, or if it’s forced upon you by circumstances.
I’m still new to it. But in this post, I aim to capture the resources that I’ve found useful about financial literacy, focusing more on personal finance. For now, I haven’t included books because I haven’t read many. Once I do, I’ll probably update this post. Like all my other posts, this one will evolve as well.
Knowledge
As always, when starting to learn, focus on basic concepts. Take things slow and build up gradually. Form your own mental model. You’ll need to gain knowledge for this. One way is to google, but that doesn’t go that far mostly because there’s so much stuff out there. You’ll likely be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff out there.
My strategy is to find a good resource (book/course) and skim through it. The Stanford course by Adam Nash – CS 007 - Personal Finance for Engineers – does a pretty good job of introducing the basics. You can either visit the lectures as a whole using the link above, or alternatively, check out the individual topics below.
Why personal finance?
Behavioral finance
Compensation
Savings and Budgeting
Assets and net worth
Debt
Investing
Financial planning and Goals
Real estate
Additional topics
People
Once you’ve the basics, and you know what language to speak and how, it’s time to listen to the experts. Now depending on your personality and how you think, you’d like some experts more over the others.
Based on my research, I’ve found two experts that I liked. Both happen to by NYU professors.
Aswath Damodaran
Aswath is amazing; I love the way he explains his thought process.
Here are some useful links:
- His website
- His youtube content
- Beginner guide with a focus on the financial setting during COVID-19
- Talks at Google - Valuation: Four Lessons to Take Away
- Talks at Google - The Value of Stories in Business. I highly recommend listening to the Q/A towards the end.
Scott Galloway
Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea but I like his candor and directness.
Here are some useful links:
Tools
- Good brokers for investing: Fidelity, Robinhood
- Money managers: Betterment, Wealthfront
- Budget planners: Mint
- Simulate the stock market by investing with monopoly money: Wall street survivors