Financial decisions can’t be made in a vacuum. Resource and money management requires an understanding of the economic landscape in order to prepare for the future. Knowledge of healthy wealth management habits doesn’t require years of schooling. Individuals can get started on their financial education journey with online financial literacy courses.
Personal finance training is also possible with courses focusing on money management, financial planning, and retirement savings for individuals. These courses prepare learners for financial situations, both in the short term and in the future. Individuals looking for financial training within a business context can learn about risk management through a professional certification program or build skills in management accounting courses. Other learning options include courses in financial analysis, decision-making, corporate accounting, and fintech.
List of The Best Financial Literacy Online Courses
There is a wide range of courses covering beginner concepts, like interest rates and bookkeeping, as well as more complex ideas. Here is a list of the best financial literacy online courses that you can check to increase your level of financial literacy.
1. Financial Literacy & Investing 101
This course is about helping people become financially stable, meaning we will help you develop a game plan to break free of living paycheck to paycheck. The goal is to develop financial literacy and gain a strong fundamental understanding of the stock market. Make no mistake, this isn’t about getting rich quickly, this will take hard work and dedication. If you are looking for specific stock recommendations or buying advice, this is not the course for you.
Course Highlights:
- Investing 101
- Basic Stock Market Terminology
- Saving Money!
- ABCs of the Stock Market
- How to invest
Course Duration: 1.5 hours
2. Personal Finance: Financial Security Thinking & Principles
Managing your finances is one of the most important things you can do in your life. It is the difference between living a life your handed or living the life you choose. In this course you will learn how to control your money, rather than letting it control you.
Course Highlights:
- How your mind keeps you from having better control over your finances
- The time-tested wealth principles that the financially successful use
- How to reduce spending without reducing the fun
- How to increase your value and increase your income
- Action plan to change your financial life for good!
Course Duration: 2.5 hours
3. Management and financial accounting: Know your numbers 1
This course will provide you with a sound foundational understanding of financial and management accounting, and how to use accounting to facilitate and align decisions made by owners, managers and employees. Via structured learning activities (video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts and written assessments) you will develop the ability to seek out financial opportunities and avoid financial misadventure. You’ll learn how to organise, create, interpret and communicate important financial information effectively, which will help you improve your organisation’s internal procedures and processes.
Course Highlights:
- Demonstrate an understanding of the development of financial statements
- Investigate and analyse financial statements in practice
- Apply financial ratios for purposes of understanding and synthesising business position and performance
- Apply a range of management accounting techniques to generate and evaluate complex ideas and concepts to improve decision making
Course Duration: 13 hours
4. Introduction to Personal Financial Planning
The Introduction to Personal Financial Planning course is designed for individuals to build financial literacy, one of the most pressing needs Americans face today. Financial decisions made by individuals impact the larger community in significant ways with pervasive cost due to financial mistakes.In this course, you’ll gain the basic building blocks of financial literacy to build a secure foundation for your future.
Course Highlights:
- Build a financial plan through a step-by-step approach designed to meet your personal financial objectives
- Understand financial planning essentials including income statements, balance sheets, and budgets
- Go deeper into your understanding of taxes and how tax decisions impact your wealth
- Identify obstacles to sound financial decisions, including common cognitive errors and confirmation biases
- Explore the scope and purpose of personal finance and its role in the broader spectrum of financial knowledge
- Appreciate how positive reinforcement and research-based evidence impact your financial goals
Course Duration: 4 weeks (4-6 hours/week)
5. Learn How To Budget – Personal budgeting made easy
The Learn How To Budget course gives you everything you need to KNOW and everything you need to DO to master the most fundamental of all financial skills – setting up and sticking to a monthly budget. After just four weeks of preparation (which you can take at your own pace) you will know exactly how to budget, how to overcome some hurdles, and will be off and running on your way to financial success.The fact is you will never be rich unless you consistently spend less than you earn (unless you win the lottery or inherit from a long lost aunt).
Course Highlights:
- Set and stick to a monthly budget
- Appreciate the benefits of financial control
- Cope with fluctuating income and irregular bills
Course Duration: 1.5 hours
6. Sustainable Investing- Harvard Business School
This course ranks sixth on the list of Financial Literacy online courses. Learn to evaluate, measure, and manage sustainable investment opportunities with cutting-edge frameworks, strategies, and techniques. The course content is well designed and helps investors get a basic understanding of what sustainable finance is, its challenges, the path forward, and its key players.
Course Highlights:
- Explore the evolving sustainable investing landscape
- Understand how to incorporate ESG factors into investment decisions
- Apply frameworks to measure and monitor sustainable investment opportunities
- Analyze cutting-edge implementation strategies
- Gain insights into the climate risk inherent in investment opportunities
- Discover how to integrate risks into financial models
- Think critically about how and where to add value while avoiding “impact washing”
Course Duration: 30 hours
7. Starting a Business: Managing Finances
The management of finances is crucial to a successful business; financial information provides the evidence to support your decisions about a business and helps to justify those decisions when you present them to other people. Whether you have an idea for a future venture or you already have a side-line business whilst studying, this course will introduce you to key financial information and gives you a chance to discuss your ideas with others.
Course Highlights:
- The importance of financial information
- An introduction to key financial information: sales revenue forecast; profit and loss forecast; and cash flow forecast
- Analysing and interpreting financial performance
- Marketing a product in terms of price and number of sales
- Key financial forecasts: determining the viability of a business opportunity
- The business plan: business finances
Course Duration: 2 weeks
8. Financial Literacy for Board Members
What do Board Members need to understand about financial statements and budgets to be able to perform their duties? Certainly such things as: Recognizing what each of the three financial statements is trying to tell the reader. This course provides – in an easy-to-understand manner – the basic knowledge to make a director comfortable at the boardroom table when the financial statements and budgets are handed out.
Course Highlights:
- Recognize what each of the three financial statements is trying to tell the reader.
- Discover how to review an operating budget.
- Identify the differences between when we record an expenditure as an asset on the balance sheet or an expense on the income statement.
- Explore the types of internal control that can be used to safeguard assets.
- Discover the ten steps that can be used to review a set of financial statements.
Course Duration: 1 hour
9. Financial Planning for Young Adults
The FPYA course is organized across eight separate modules within a 4-week window. Topics covered include financial goal setting, saving and investing, budgeting, financial risk, borrowing and credit. Because financial planning is such a personal topic, you will be encouraged to define your own financial goals and objectives while we discuss concepts and provide tools that can be applied to help you reach those goals. Within each module, you will view a combination of traditional lecture-style videos along with video vignettes that introduce financial topics for discussion among participants. The final module in the class is devoted to the topic of financial planning as a career.
Course Highlights:
Course Duration: 19 hours
10. Principles of Wealth Management
This course is tenth on the list of Financial Literacy online courses and covers traditional theories in finance as well as more recent developments in financial markets. Learn about asset classes such as stocks and bonds and about financial instruments such as derivatives. Explore overarching principles of finance such as compound interest, the time value of money, investment risk and modern portfolio theory. In addition, you’ll get an introduction to the history of finance, the dynamics of market crashes, negative interest rates and the role of central banks within an economy.
Course Highlights:
- Identify asset classes and instruments.
- Calculate the time value of money and compounding return.
- Reflect on the meaning of market efficiency for financial markets.
- Demonstrate knowledge of fundamental aspects of finance such as Risk and Return Diversification.
- Explore the basic principles of Portfolio Theory.
- Assess the concepts of finance as integral parts of the wealth management process
Course Duration: 7 weeks
11. Financial Basics Everyone Should Know
How do banks work? Are you saving enough for retirement? Considering the answers to these questions and understanding financial basics is critical to planning a strong financial future. This course breaks down the mystery around the financial industry and provides practical knowledge for everyone, so you can manage accounts in an informed way, whether you are working with a financial advisor or not. Topics covered include savings, investments, insurance, retirement, and more.
Course Duration: 1.5 hours
12. How to Read Financial Statements: Build Financial Literacy.
If you are in business, you need to speak the language. No matter if you’re in sales, marketing, manufacturing, purchasing, accounting, or finance, you need to speak the language of business. The course contains 20 three-to-eight-minute videos each followed by a multiple-choice quiz. A case is provided for Facebook. The course will take 100 minutes to view the videos and another 45 minutes to take the quizzes and do the Facebook case.
Course Highlights:
- Explain how the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows are used, what they measure, and why we need three statements.
- Explain who are the six most important stakeholders of a corporation (employees, customers, government, vendors, lenders, investors)
- Illustrate how accrual accounting can both record cash and profits using a spreadsheet
- Locate management’s explanation for year-to-year changes in ratios from the company’s annual report
- Explain how four industries (distribution, manufacturing, service, and financial services differ in the way they make money
Course Duration: 2.5 hours
13. Beginner’s Guide to Managing Money [Financial Literacy]
If you want to be rich, you must make financially intelligent decisions. This all starts with being financially literate. This course is designed with you in mind. Understanding that everyone has a busy schedule and lifestyle, the course has been broken down into 8 lessons. The course is designed to be one lesson per week understanding that most students will be learning this as an extracurricular activity. If you would like to accelerate the course, it can be done in as little as one to two days.
Course Highlights:
- Students will learn the basics of personal money management and learn how to create a budget.
Course Duration: 34 mins
