Course Name: FIN 1750. Personal Finance: Financial Citizenship in Social and Economic Systems. 3 Hours.

Course Description:

Society is placing increasing responsibility on individuals for their financial well-being (e.g., retirement, health care). This course is devoted to building quantitative skills associated with individual financial decision making and analyzing the connection between individual decisions and societal well-being. This course seeks to address the "how" and "why" in personal financial decisions. Topics covered include credit/debt, property insurance, saving, and investing. The course will draw on multiple disciplines. Economics, finance, and applied mathematics are directly addressed. Public financial policy in areas of political science, law, and psychology are also discussed.

Course Purpose:

This course is a life skill and is structured to introduce you to a way of thinking about your personal financial decisions. This should lead you to thinking harder and farther about the larger and longer consequences of your decisions. Many of the more practical aspects of personal finance will change over time, as practices, technologies, intermediaries, customs, and laws change, but a fundamental awareness of ways to think well about solving financial questions can always be useful. Some of the more practical ideas may be obviously and immediately relevant—and some not—but decision-making and research skills are lasting.

Prior knowledge of economics and math may enhance personal finance decisions; however, such skills are not necessary. Software, downloadable applications, and calculators perform ever more sophisticated functions with ever more approachable interfaces. The emphasis in this text is on understanding the fundamental relationships behind the math and being able to use that understanding to make better decisions about your personal finances.

Entire tomes, both academic texts and trade books, have been and will be written about any of the subjects featured in each section of this course. The idea here is to introduce you to the practical and conceptual framework for making personal financial decisions in the larger context of your life, and in the even larger context of your individual life as part of a greater economy of financial participants.

Online Textbook:

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