With household budgets feeling the pinch, the Finance Fundamentals: Financial Planning and Budgeting course shows how to bring order to your finances and make good financial decisions.
What you will learn
The Finance Fundamentals: Financial Planning and Budgeting course starts by looking at the current economic backcloth and its impact on household finances. It then moves on to explore your attitude to financial management and whether you have bad financial planning habits and how these should be addressed.
The course introduce a simple four-stage model for making financial decisions before moving on to examine the two components of household budgeting – income and expenditure. Participants learn about the impact of inflation and taxation on incomes and the support to households provided by the state benefit system.
In examining expenditure, the course scrutinises the pressures placed on us to spend our money, how to shop online with confidence and how ‘heuristics’ can interfere with good spending decision-making.
The course finishes by looking at a key area of household spending: insurance. It examines when to insure and when to bear the risks yourself without buying an insurance policy. The financial planning model introduced at the start of the course is used to make good decisions when buying insurance.
This facilitated four-week course is up to date and uses an array of audio-visual aids to help you through the subject matter.
About the course
Develop fundamental business and finance skills
This course has been developed by The Open University Business School – an institution that is triple accredited by AMBA, EQUIS and AACSB.
It is one of eight from The Open University, designed to help you gain fundamental business and financial skills, including communication, networking, relationship building, project management, personal financial planning and management, investment and financial services.
You can complete this course as part of one of these two programmes:
Finance Fundamentals: four courses, which will give you valuable skills to manage finances at home and at work, and enable you to earn a FutureLearn Award.
Business and Finance Fundamentals: eight courses; holders of FutureLearn Certificates of Achievement for all eight courses can earn 30 UK credits towards The Open University Business School’s BA in Business Management by passing a linked Open University assessment module (requiring separate OU registration and fee).
This course has been adapted from original material created by The Open University’s True Potential Centre for the Public Understanding of Finance, and was made possible thanks to the generous support of True Potential LLP.
Requirements
For further information about registration, the final assessment course, your eligibility and the BA in Business Management, visit the Open University website. The Open University does not operate in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. This means that learners based in those countries will not be able to convert their participation in this programme to Open University course credits.
Starting date: 9 January, 2017
Duration: 4 weeks, 3 hours per week
Language: English
Instructors: Martin Upton
Institution: The Open University
