As you’re trying to learn about personal finance, a question you might be facing is “what even are the basic topics of personal finance?” Well, personal finance has to do with money. More to the point, it has to do with your money.
Although there are many, many topics covered in personal finance, the three fundamental, foundational, beginning topics that everyone should know about are careers, taxes, and budgeting.
Your career (your job) is one of the basic ways of gaining money; taxes (what you need to pay the government) are possibly even more important, as there are legal issues if you ignore them; and budgeting (mapping out where your money goes) is essential. Budgeting can help you with self control. A good budget should account for how much money you’re going to gain from a career, how much you’re going to lose by paying taxes, how much you need for basic needs such as food and clothes, how much you should save for retirement, and how much you have left over for extraneous spending.
For a 24-minute PowerPoint video presentation from professors at California State University, Northridge about the basics of financial planning, click here.
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