Personal Finance #5-Purchasing Strategies

This course will concentrate on large personal purchases, outlining buying strategies to make the best long-term purchase decisions.

Human beings are great at short-term decisions, those where we can hone down our habits, training our gut so that we can trust our gut during future similar discussions.

However, we are not as good at making decisions that impact multiple years into the future, in part because we do not make them as often, so we don’t have the opportunity to train our gut the same way we do with short-term decisions.

With long-term decisions, we need a formal decision-making process instead of trusting our habits and gut.

We will not be focusing on a home purchase in this course, even though it is one of the most significant individual purchases because the home purchase is sufficiently complex to warrant its own course. However, we can apply many of the concepts we discuss here to a home purchase decision too.

Learners will learn how to make purchasing decisions related to a car and large appliances. We will also discuss warranties and how they impact our significant purchase decisions.

The course will cover the decision to purchase a car versus leasing a vehicle.

The course will include example problems to make concepts more concrete.

It will also have practice problems, including downloadable Excel Workbooks, which users may also open using Google Sheets.

The Excel Workbooks will generally have at least two tabs. One tab will have the answer key so learners can deconstruct the problem. The second tab is where we work the practice problem step-by-step along with the instructional videos.