Finance Lectures

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Welcome to Money 101

This short video course will introduce you to the basics of personal financial management. The course is subdivided into several modules, and each module in turn contains several video lessons. Each video is set up for playback within your browser, and is also available for download in MP4 and Webm formats. The slides are offered for download in PPT and PDF formats, and video transcripts are also available for download in plain text. If applicable, spreadsheets accompanying the lessons are also downloadable.

Each lesson targets a set of learning objectives which are stated up front. Within the videos, you will often see short questions inviting you to pause the video, and perform various actions to answer the question - search the web, think about the question in light of the discussion, or sometimes just make an educated guess.

Modules are also associated with short question sets. If you are doing this as part of a class, your instructor can post these on blackboard. Otherwise, they are also viewable in plain HTML in your browser.

The prerequisites for this course are very mild. This is what you need to know:

• Reading and understanding English. Transcripts of videos are available to help you out.
• Basic computer literacy. If you managed to get to this website all by yourself, you're probably ok.
• Middle school mathematics. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation, percentages, fractions, maybe some simple algebra. If you need a refresher on any of these, Khan Academy, an excellent and free educational resource, covers this material well. Here's their math section, here's the percentages tutorial, for instance.

I hope to expand this course with more lessons covering other important personal finance topics. If you have suggestions for particular topics to cover, send me an email.

If you are experiencing video playback issues, try a different browser, or download the videos and use a desktop video player.

The course is available as a more complete full version, and also as an abridged sequence. If you have the time to spare, the full version is recommended.

With all that out of the way, let's get started!

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all the people who provide vast amounts of liberally licensed media available for reuse with minimal or no restrictions. In particular, I have used a lot of public domain, Creative Commons CC0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed media, sourced from Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay. Attributions are noted at the end of the videos, as needed.

I am indebted to the multitude of open source software projects that I rely on for my computing needs, including the making of this course. In addition to the operating system stack provided by Xubuntu, I have relied on the Gromit-MPX annotation tool, OpenShot Video Editor, VLC media player, MPlayer media player, SimpleScreenRecorder, avconv video converter, and LibreOffice.

I am also grateful to Rowan University for encouraging me to create this course.

Contact

Other course videos

• Quantitative Methods in Finance
• Fixed Income Securities