The Wall Street Journal. Personal Finance Workbook PDF
Preview The Wall Street Journal. Personal Finance Workbook
OTHER BOOKS BY JEFF D. OPDYKE AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The Wall Street Journal. Guide to the Business of Life Nancy Keates The Wall Street Journal. Complete Money & Investing Guidebook Dave Kansas The Wall Street Journal. Complete Personal Finance Guidebook Jeff D. Opdyke Love and Money: A Life Guide to Financial Success Jeff D. Opdyke INTRODUCTION PART 1 BUILDING YOUR FINANCIAL BASE CHAPTER 1 Budgeting The Personal Budget The Spending Plan Pay Yourself First Emergency Savings The Annual Budget CHAPTER 2 Banking: Checking, Savings, and Certificates of Deposit Checking Accounts Certificates of Deposit— and When Breaking One Makes Sense Building a CD Ladder CHAPTER 3 Planning: Preparing for the Worst Insurance Do I Need Insurance? How Much Insurance Do I Need? CHAPTER 4 Borrowing: Accumulating and Managing Debt Warning Signs You Carry Too Much Debt Is Your Debt Too High? Paying Down Debt Buying a Home Renting Versus Buying: Weighing the Trade-Offs How Much Can You Afford? Shopping for a Loan Tax Savings Calculating the Equity in Your Home To Refinance or Not The Old College Try: Saving for a Child's Education How Much to Save? Buying a Car The Ins and Outs of Auto Leases Turning a Money Factor into an Interest Rate Comparing Leases CHAPTER 5 Be Prepared—It's Not Just a Motto for the Boy Scouts The Wallet Register Financial Accounts Safe-Deposit Boxes PART II BUILDING YOUR ASSETS CHAPTER 6 Investing Determining Your Net Worth Rating Your Tolerance for Risk Short Term? Long Term? Something in Between? Compounding: The Most Powerful Force in the Universe First Things First Brokerage-Firm Basics Wall Street in Words and Formulas Calculating Your Rate of Return Index Investing: No Effort Required Exchange-Traded Funds: Minimal Effort Required Dollar-Cost Averaging CHAPTER 7 Retirement Planning: Feathering the Nest Egg How Much Will I Need in Retirement? Asset Allocation: Rocket Science for Beginners Asset Allocation Models Where Do I Invest? What Might a Diversified Portfolio Look Like? Company Stock: Buy, Sell, or Hold? The ABCs of IRAs Annuities: Great for Some; Lousy for Many Which Annuity Is Right for Me? A Taxing Matter CONCLUSION The simple fact about personal finance is that managing your money requires a bit of math. Sorry. In truth, most of the math is easy and obvious, though some of it can seem complex when you must make comparisons between, say, buying a car and taking the rebate or the 0% financing, or leasing the vehicle instead. With some of it, like gauging your potential financial needs for retirement or gauging the costs of college eighteen years from now—well, it's sometimes hard to even know where to begin. Thus, this workbook. These pages are designed to complement a companion book, The Wall Street Journal Complete Personal Finance Guidebook, a thorough primer for understanding and taking control of every aspect of your personal financial life. That said, this workbook is written to stand on its own for those who already have a working knowledge of personal finance and just want a resource to help calculate, for instance, when it makes sense to refinance your home or how to comparison-shop for the best mortgage. Along with various worksheets and formulas designed to make the math part of personal finance easier, a variety of tips are interspersed throughout to help you make better decisions when spending, saving, and investing your limited resources. Also, given that we live in the Internet age, interactive versions of the worksheets can be found online at www.WSJ.com/BookTools. This workbook is divided into two broad sections: “Building Your Financial Base” and “Building Your Assets.” The first section tackles what we'll call domestic finance—all that money stuff that happens in the home: creating a budget, balancing a checkbook, managing your debt, and protecting your family's assets with life insurance. In that section you'll also find help planning for college and planning for the worst—the possibility that bad things happen that require you to tap into emergency savings or which demand you produce a full and immediate accounting of the possessions in your home. You'll also learn how to determine in your situation the smartest method for acquiring a car. The second section pulls apart what you need to know about investing, everything from buying stocks through a brokerage firm to determining the right type of annuity for you and your family. In between you'll find worksheets that will help you gauge your own tolerance for risk, and a rundown of the terms and formulas that Wall Street employs. The “Building Your Assets” section is largely structured around putting together a well-diversified portfolio in your retirement savings accounts, since preparing for retirement is the most significant investment purpose most readers will have. To paraphrase Woody Allen's famous claim that 90% of success is just showing up: 90% of financial success is just trying. You don't need to be a certified financial planner; you don't need to be a chartered financial analyst. You don't need to be a mutual-fund portfolio manager or a Wall Street investment banker. You don't even need a degree in finance to manage your own money. All you need you already have: a desire to know and a workbook to lead the way. Oh, and of course, a little math, which we're going to help you with.
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