On-line financial education

In my post yesterday I mentioned the important need to get educated on financial matters.

I forgot to mention one of my favorite resources for on-line for educational content, the Khan Academy. If you have not heard of the Khan Academy I highly recommend that you check the website out. Here is their brief story;

My uncle’s family visited me in Boston after my wedding in the summer of 2004. At some point during the trip, my Aunt told me that her daughter (my cousin) was having trouble with “unit conversion” which was not allowing her to be placed in the more advanced math track for 7th grade. Nadia was clearly a very bright girl, so I made a deal with her. I’d remotely tutor her for an hour after work as long as she was willing to do any extra work I gave her.

I began remotely tutoring Nadia in August of 2004. She was in New Orleans–where I also grew up– so we used a telephone to talk and Yahoo Doodle as a shared notepad. Nadia ended up catching up and getting ahead of her class so I started tutoring her brothers, Arman and Ali, as well. Eventually, word got around and I was remotely tutoring and handful of cousins and family friends. Scheduling around my work, their soccer practice, and the different time zones became a little ridiculous, so I started to make YouTube videos for them to watch in their own time, at their own pace.

It didn’t take long to see that other students (including adult learners) were hungry for videos like these so I kept going!

Khan has over 1800 videos on-line on a broad array of topics from Algebra to Physics to Finance. The finance section is by no means complete but its a good place to get started. The finance section has videos ranging from explaining compound interest to explaining mortgage backed securities. Its a great place to go to get up to speed on a topic you’re interested in.

Enjoy!