So you've completed CS007. And graduated Stanford. You've even managed to save around $10K in cash from various summer jobs and gifts from relatives. The consensus advice investment management professionals would offer is to sock it away in a well-diversified set of Vanguard Funds. Which you keep adding to on a monthly basis allocated from your paycheck. As well as re-investing any dividends generated. Which will compound nicely over the next thirty years. Leaving you with a $1M nest egg that will provide stable yearly income during your golden years. As well as a decent inheritance left over for the next generation.<p>But I have a really hard time giving this advice to a 22 year old. I certainly didn't heed it myself. Instead I used the cash and spent 100% of it on my own professional and personal development. So, naturally, since this is Stanford and Silicon Valley. I'd include a section on Risk. Taking it. Managing it. What are the rewards. As well as the costs. But with the emphasis the post-graduation 5-10 year window may represent a unique opportunity in your life to take it. And that there are programs such as StartX and YC available to assist should you decide to go all in.
I think this is really great but IMHO college is too late for this. Personal finance should be taught in middle and high schools just like health classes.<p>When I was 18 and a freshman in college I saw some crazy decisions including using student loans to put a down payment on a car or taking out private loans for spending money.
This is a class full of engineers from Stanford, many of whom are going to be making $100k+ straight out of college. Yet 92% aren't going to be responsible for any student loans.<p>Wealthy parents? Incredible student aid from Stanford's endowment? Both? Either way, I have a feeling this is one of the biggest advantages they will have in achieving a secure financial future.
Let me make this as simple as possible.<p>The most important thing in personal finance is the delta between how much you net, and, how much you spend. Period. Increase the former, or decrease the latter. Preferably both. You will 'earn' far more in savings by the money YOU contributed than the amount paid to you in interest; unless you have much money over a long enough period of time, and you likely won't.
Fantastic set of topics! As an engineering undergrad at UC Davis, I took a course in engineering law which was incredibly helpful. It's great to see a course in personal finance for engineers. As an entrepreneur building financial services for STEM professionals, I see a distinct opportunity to educate this demographic. While financial education for all demographics is desperately lacking in the US, the STEM crowd has the mathematical training to be presented with a more rigorous treatment of the topics. Moreover, STEM professionals quite often have compensation packages that include complex financial arrangements (e.g. deferred comp.) and/or derivatives (e.g. options) that are difficult to value and/or manage.
Is there any significant benefit of thinking tens of long-term/short-term goals and planning, and managing different funds for them (emergency, travel, house, card, kid's college education..). Why not just have a 1-2 funds to dump your savings in and be smart about withdrawing from it? One could consist of conservative investment vehicles, other could have more aggressive ones.
Question for hackernews: where did everyone else learn about this stuff?<p>Going through the material, I found I already knew 50-75% of it, but from bits and pieces of information I learned over the years, not one consolidated place. Is it the same for others?
Here's an interesting idea, a game environment for testing/building one's personal finance skills:<p><a href="https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/financial-empowerment-challenge/ideas/the-sims-personal-finance-life-simulation" rel="nofollow">https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/financial-empowerm...</a>
I am neither a professional financial analyst nor a writer, but I wanted to share what I've learned about financial management over the last 25 years with my 18 and 20 year old kids, so I wrote a series of posts called Hacker Finances. I take a lot of liberties with the Hacker notion, but all of the advice is painfully learned and hopefully the kids will read it and profit, or at least avoid major mistakes, when they are ready.<p><a href="https://hackernoon.com/https-medium-com-davisjames-hacker-finances-introduction-14b8283e8677" rel="nofollow">https://hackernoon.com/https-medium-com-davisjames-hacker-fi...</a>
This is really cool, albeit a bit high-level and leaves you with the question: ok, what does this <i>actually</i> mean for me?<p>I hate these startup plugs on random threads (genuinely), but here it actually might be helpful for people. At Finimize, we're basically taking all the stuff that Adam is talking about and we're putting it into an algorithm that will tell <i>you</i> what <i>you</i> should be doing – from savings to investments to debt.<p>Like I said, not trying to pitch anything here, but feel free to check it out www.finimize.com/mylife – or ping me an email to hello[at]finimize.com if you want to get a demo (we're still in closed beta).<p>Peace!
This is really an excellent intro to personal finance. I came to it expecting to see the standard "save 10% of your salary" rule that's so pervasive. But this is really thorough. I wish my school had a course like this. Great work!
the key with money/investing is you want to stay alive long enough to get lucky.<p>if you sock away money every month, make sure you have 6 months of living expenses off to the side for emergencies, bet ~20% on crazy things with unlimited upside and the remaining 80% in a very traditional way, you stand a good chance over the very long term.<p>just make sure that when things get rocky you are one of the strong hands and only sell when you want to.<p>as for the dollar values etc ... totally tied to city-specific cost of living ... totally impossible to compare between individuals (e.g., family vs. single, country-specific tax codes, medium and long term financial goals).
I've been interested in a household finance visualiser recently, but also don't want to upload my bank statements to some random website.<p>This uses IndexedDB, and is pre-alpha and very buggy and feature-less still:<p><a href="https://github.com/opyate/fin" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/opyate/fin</a><p>Just putting it out there if anyone's interested in Clojurescript/Hoplon and personal finance.
Can't they use something better than SlideShare? I can't even display it fullscreen on mobile. Even a stupid old PDF would be far better than promoting this commercial crap.
This is great but I think a personal finance course should be mandatory for all high school students. It is much more important than the the other curriculum.