Kevin C. Wong

Khan Academy - Financial Literacy Course [+]

Khan Academy is a non-profit offering online courses for everyone. From the selection it seems to be mostly high school level material and some amount of college level material.

I went through the Financial Literacy course which took me a couple of months at maybe an hour a day. It covers:

  • Budgeting and saving
  • Consumer credit
  • Financial goals
  • Loans and debt
  • Insurance
  • Investments and retirement
  • Scams & fraud
  • Careers and education
  • Taxes and tax forms
  • Employment
  • Banking
  • Car buying
  • Housing

I would guess it's at an early high school level and some of this would be covered in a home economics class but since I think few people take home economics this course is quite useful. I think it's mostly common sense but I did learn a few things.

A topic is broken into lessons. Each lesson has videos, text, and a quiz all reinforcing each other. At the end of the topic is an overall quiz. Overall I found this an effective format.

There are two additional topics which at this point in time seem to be works in progress. The last topic is split into lots of topics and mostly videos, many of which you've seen previously. It does end with two unusual topics: how to pay for college with videos done by a third party college strategies company, and how blockchain works also done by a third party and a bit too much like promotional material.

So overall I'd recommend taking this course because it has a lot of basic things people should know. And I'd recommend skipping the last two topics (teacher resources, additional resources).