Since you’re sitting there reading up on a financial blog I’ll assume you know a little bit about finding free information and advice on the web. But the amount of ostensibly clueless investors and financial irresponsible individuals in this world doesn’t seem to add up to the amount of awesome information that exists for free out there on the web. In addition, it certainly doesn’t make much sense how much money people spend on this very same knowledge through seminars, books, and one-on-one consultations.
To put it bluntly, it’s ridiculous. If you ever want to become truly financially independent, you have to become good at finding the information you need to succeed, especially when it’s free and sitting right in front of you.
Granted, you have to know where to look. For example you could scour search engines for hours trying to find the formula for figuring out your potential mortgage payment projections, unaware that a mortgage calculator is very accessible tool to use that’s free of charge. Speaking of calculators, several agencies of the federal government provide further financial calculators for the benefit of American citizens. The Federal Reserve, for example, has a credit card repayment calculator on their site, while the Department of Education has a calculator for student borrowers to anticipate their repayment expectations. All the while, people could be flying right by these useful tools in an attempt to find the dubious data held on untrustworthy sites provided to them based on the hapless keywords they entered into a subjective search engine.
Truly one of the biggest mistakes people make when looking for financial information online is that they end up missing the forest for the trees. Google any phrase with a related Wikipedia entry, for example, and it will always appear near the top of search results. But there’s still a lingering stigma held against wiki sites and the information held within that keeps people away. Rest assured, however, that the information contained within those articles, is going to more likely than not provide you with the details needed. At the very least, the citations will send you in the right direction.
Other sources for swaths of knowledge are more honed to our traditional way of learning; the Khan Academy, for example, is a collection of thousands of hours of lectures that over everything from basic math to college level chemistry. You might say to yourself “I learned all that stuff in school, and how would it help me better my finances?” Apart from the fact that the Khan Academy has a whole collection of tutorials on basic banking principles, the idea that you can recall with perfection the ideas and information you were taught over a decade ago, Wikipedia “human memory”.
Before you call up that adviser, or pay for that latest personal finance advice book written by the same person who wrote the one you bought last year, make sure you exhaust online sources for free information. The era of an entirely untrustworthy Internet is long gone. You just need to know where to look.
