Personal finance basics: budgeting, an emergency fund, and compound interest

This course is for someone who earns money but has never managed it on purpose: the paycheck lands, the month happens, and by the next payday it is somehow gone — with no savings behind it and no clear picture of where it went. Words like budget, emergency fund, and compound interest sound like they belong to people who are already good with money. They are not. Each one is a small, mechanical habit you can run with your own numbers, a calculator, and one sheet of paper.

The course ends with one real thing: a one-page money plan built from your own income and expenses — a monthly budget, an emergency-fund target with a timeline to reach it, and a projection of how a fixed monthly amount grows over years. Everything before it exists so that this plan is yours, not a template.

By the end you'll be able to (course objectives):

Separate your take-home pay from your gross pay and sort a month of spending into fixed and variable expenses.
Build a monthly budget that assigns every unit of income a job, using the 50/30/20 split as a starting point.
Size an emergency fund to your own essential expenses, decide where to keep it, and set a timeline to reach it.
Explain how compound interest grows savings over time, why compounding frequency matters, and how the same force works against you on debt.
Put money moves in a sensible order — budget, starter fund, high-interest debt, full fund, then investing — and explain why waiting has a cost.
Assemble a one-page money plan from your real numbers and check each part against a concrete criterion.

Prerequisites: None. You do not need any finance background, an app, or a bank product. If you can read your own bank statement and multiply a number by a percentage, you can start. This course teaches general concepts and how to apply them to your own numbers; it is not personalized investment advice, and it names where a licensed professional is the right next step.

Practice environment: Your own real numbers, on paper or in any spreadsheet, plus a basic calculator. Lessons 04 and 06 use the free U.S. SEC compound-interest calculator at investor.gov in a browser, but every calculation also has a by-hand version. There is no embedded sandbox; your own budget is the sandbox. Amounts are shown in dollars as a unit — the method is identical in any currency.

Lessons

#	Topic	You'll learn
01	Take-home pay and where it goes	Take-home vs gross pay, and sorting a month of spending into fixed and variable
02	A monthly budget with the 50/30/20 split	A budget as a plan for every dollar, needs vs wants, and the 50/30/20 starting split
03	The emergency fund: the first savings goal	Why a buffer comes first, sizing it to essential expenses, and where to keep it
04	Compound interest: how money grows over time	Principal, compounding, why frequency matters, and how APY and APR bake it in
05	The order of operations for money	Budget, starter fund, high-interest debt, full fund, invest — and the cost of waiting
06	A one-page money plan	Assembling budget, fund target, and a compound-growth projection from your own numbers

Sources listed in sources.md.