Keown is the only Personal Finance text that builds on 15 Principles to help students develop an intuitive understanding of the process of financial planning so they can use the resources learned in this course to be better financial planners.

This text is written directly to the student. It teaches students how to manage their personal finances. It concentrates on the fundamentals and underlying principles of personal finance, rather than focusing on equations and specific tools which are more easily forgotten.

What are the goals of your course?  Do you want to make your students better financial planners?

• Reinforces the 15 Principles of Personal Finance.  Tools, techniques, and equations are easily forgotten, but the logic and fundamental principles that drive their use, once understood, will stay and will become part of a student’s “financial personality.”   Throughout the rest of their lives, students will have the ability to drawn upon these principles to help them effectively deal with an ever-changing financial environment.  For this reason, the presentation is centered around 15 fundamental principles of personal finance, which are introduced in Chapter 1 and then reappear in every chapter throughout the book.  See the TOC.

How do you prepare your students to make informed financial decisions at ley points of their lives?

• An extensive discussion of 10 “Financial Life Events.” This discussion in Chapter 18 serves to tie together the concepts and tools in the book — it is a section that would be fun to teach and also be of value to all students regardless of their age. It is also something no one else has.  In the course of your lifetime you will experience many events that will change your goals, affect your financial resources, and create new financial obligations or opportunities for you.  While there is an almost unlimited number of these type of life events, Keown discuses on 10 of the most common, and with each one we present a comprehensive step by step discussion of how you should respond to them.  These financial life events include:
• Life Event 1: Getting Started 
• Life Event 2: Marriage. 
• Life Event 3: Buying a Home
• Life Event 4: Having a Child. 
• Life Event 5:  Inheritances, Bonuses, or Unexpected Money 
• Life Event 6:  A Major Illness
• Life Event 7: Caring for an Elderly Parent. 
• Life Event 8:  Retiring 
• Life Event 9: Death of a Spouse 
• Life Event 10:  Divorce

How do you give your students the tools to remember the concepts learned in this course long after they have completed it?

• Highlights easy-to-follow advice — the proactive checklists, which appear throughout the text, serve as a useful learning tool for students.  These boxes identify areas of concern and questions to be asked when buying a car, getting insurance, investing in mutual funds, and performing other personal finance tasks.

How do you provide the tools for working though students’ own financial decisions?

• Keown provides opportunity to work through many of their own Personal Finance Decisions — each new copy of the text is accompanied by a Personal Finance Workbook, free of charge.  These workbooks contain tear-our worksheets to provide a step-by-step analysis of many of the personal finance decisions examined in the book. They can be used for homework assignments or to guide students through actual decisions. The workbook includes a section on how to use a financial calculator. Text references to the worksheets appear in the margin at the appropriate point.

OTHER POINTS OF DISTINCTION

How do you include current news articles that relate to Personal Finance in your course?

• “In the News” Boxes.  This boxed feature includes excerpts from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, including many boxes that feature the work of Jonathan Clements, the famous Wall Street Journal reporter.

How do you incorporate actual Financial Planners’ advice in your course for your students to use after they have completed the course?

• Finance Matters.  Boxes at the end of each chapter written by Marcy Furney, CFP, provide checklists of things to do–in effect, free advice from a certified financial planner.

How do you model real life financial decisions that your students will need to make in their lives in your course?

• Mini Cases.  Each chapter closes with a set of two mini cases that provide students with real-life problems that tie together the chapter topics and need a practical financial decision.
• Continuing Case–Cory and Tisha Dumont.  At the end of each part in the book, a continuing case provides an opportunity to synthesize and integrate the many different financial concepts presented in the book. It gives the student a chance to construct financial statements, analyze a changing financial situation, calculate taxes, measure risk exposure, and develop a financial plan.