With my last finance related post, I became very aware of how much financial basics I need to cover on the road to having a series of personal finance 101 resources. Clearly, my long term goal is to have a comprehensive resource to address this topic in the future, but I also realize that pumping out all those posts will take time. In that meantime, I will provide some quality references that started me off on personal finance education. As a bonus, all of these sites are free.

In college I sat in during a presentation regarding personal finance, which marked the start of my personal finance kick. Particularly the compounding of interest caught my eye. This encouraged me to look in other places to continue educating myself. The most important foundation was CNN’s personal finance site, particularly the Money 101. It has since changed in format (and called something different) since those days, but still have has much of the same information to serve as a primer. Yahoo Finance, Bank Rate, and MSN were other early sources of information. I now use Yahoo much more and the other two sparingly, but they still can be useful resources. Finally, although I did not stumble across Wisebread until later, I would really recommend this as the best resource to cut down on expenses.

Mom and Dad also had something to do with it, as they were great role models of financial discipline growing up and still a valuable sources of information. I am also fortunate enough to have some friends and family in the financial world who I ask specific questions and kick around ideas with. Lastly, my accountant has been a valuable resource for tax planning purposes. It might be impractical to steal away my family and friends away as financial advisors, but I think you get the idea. Have a couple of trusted people around you who can provide some financial ideas if needed. This person should not be selling you things, asking for your social security number, or making decisions for you. If so, find someone else you trust or consider getting a financial advisor (although this is a actually a process too).

Hope this helps,

Steve