What is “financial literacy” and how does one become “financially literate”?
Wikipedia has a nice definition of financial literacy (emphasis below is mine): [...] refers to an   individual's ability to make informed   judgments and effective decisions   about the use and management of their   money. Raising interest in personal   finance is now a focus of state-run   programs in countries including   Australia, Japan, the United States   and the UK. [...]  As for how you can become financially literate, here are some suggestions: Learn about how basic financial products works: bank accounts, mortgages, credit cards, investment accounts, insurance (home, car, life, disability, medical.) Free printed & online materials should be available from your existing financial service providers to help you with your existing products.  In particular, learn about the fees, interest, or other charges you may incur with these products.  Becoming fee-aware is a step towards financial literacy, since financially literate people compare costs.  Seek out additional information on each type of product from unbiased sources (i.e. sources not trying to sell you something.) Get out of debt and stay out of debt. This may take a while. Focus on your highest-interest loans first. Learn the difference between good debt and bad debt.   Learn about compound interest.  Once you understand compound interest, you'll understand why being in debt is bad for your financial well-being. If you aren't already saving money for retirement, start now.  Investigate whether your employer offers an advantageous matched 401(k) plan (or group RRSP/DC plan for Canadians) or a pension plan.  If your employer offers a good plan, sign up.  If you get to choose your own investments, keep it simple and favor low-cost balanced index funds until you understand the different types of investments.  Read the material provided by the plan sponsor, try online tools provided, and seek out additional information from unbiased sources. If your employer doesn't offer an advantageous retirement plan, open an individual retirement account or IRA (or personal RRSP for Canadians.)  If your employer does offer a plan, you can set one of these up to save even more.  You could start with access to a family of low-cost mutual funds (examples: Vanguard for Americans, or TD eFunds for Canadians) or earn advanced credit by learning about discount brokers and self-directed accounts. Understand how income taxes and other taxes work.  If you have an accountant prepare your taxes, ask questions.  If you prepare your taxes yourself, understand what you're doing and don't file blind.  Seek help if necessary.  There are many good books on how income tax works.  Software packages that help you self-file often have online help worth reading – read it. Learn about life insurance, medical insurance, disability insurance, wills, living wills & powers of attorney, and estate planning.  Death and illness can derail your family's finances.  Learn how these things can help. Seek out and read key books on personal finance topics.  e.g. Your Money Or Your Life, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, The Four Pillars of Investing, The Random Walk Guide to Investing, and many more. Seek out and read good personal finance blogs.  There's a wealth of information available for free on the Internet, but do check facts and assumptions. Here are some suggested blogs for American readers and some suggested blogs for Canadian readers. Subscribe to a personal finance periodical and read it.  Good ones to start with are Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine in the U.S. and MoneySense Magazine in Canada.  The business section in your local newspaper may sometimes have personal finance articles worth reading, too. Shameless plug: Ask more questions on this site. The Personal Finance & Money Stack Exchange is here to help you learn about money & finance, so you can make better financial decisions.  We're all here to learn and help others learn about money. Keep learning! Financial Literacy is about learning about finance and money and how to use and manage them to give you better outcomes in life. Just like the more books you read and the more writing you do will improve your literacy, the more financial books you read, the more questions you ask and the more you participate in this forum and others like it, the more you will improve your financial literacy.  The more financial literate you are the more you will be able to make informed decisions regarding your finances and the more you will be able to avoid financial scams.
Financial literacy for individuals is the instruction and comprehension of different money related issues. This subject concentrates on the capacity to manage personal finance matters in a productive way, and it incorporates the information of settling on suitable choices about individual finance, for example, insurance premiums, educational fees, real estate investments, tax planning, retirement saving, budget management and so on.   Let's have a look at the importance of Financial Literacy in an Individual's life so that it can become a source of inspiration for you.   Inspiration and financial literacy for individuals enable people to end up plainly independent with the goal that they can accomplish budgetary solidness. The individuals who comprehend the subject ought to have the capacity to answer a few inquiries concerning buys, for example, regardless of whether a thing is required, whether it is reasonable, and whether it a benefit or a risk.   Financial literacy for individuals shows the practices and states of mind a man has about cash that is connected to his everyday life. Financial literacy demonstrates how an individual settles on monetary choices. This attitude can enable a man to build up a money related guide to distinguish what he procures, what he spends and what he owes.   The absence of financial education can prompt owing a lot of obligation and settle on poor monetary choices. For instance, the preferences or drawbacks of settled and variable loan costs are ideas that are less demanding to comprehend and settle on educated choices about in the event that you have monetary proficiency abilities.   Monetary proficiency training ought to likewise incorporate hierarchical abilities, consumer rights, innovation and worldwide financial matters in light of the fact that the condition of the worldwide economy incredibly influences the U.S. Economy.  As per the saying of one of the renowned actor cum producer, Lucille Bell, 'Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself'. Yes, the current market trend has proved this inspirational quote to a true extent. Investing money into trading and financial market is a hard nut to crack and it requires a thought-provoking financial inspiration for individuals. To earn handsome money, you need to become smart enough to understand the market behavior, market flows and all the associated ups and downs. Now, you are confused. No, you don't need to hold an MBA degree or become a financial expert to learn lucrative investing skills. Wealth Generators is there for you to make you learn all the essentials techniques required to make your hard earned money provide you with the best output which you can never imagine. Yes, optimism and the smart skills are the two pivotal ways to get success over the curvature of the financial twisting.   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I was wondering how the logistics of interest and dividend payments are handled on assets , such as mortgages, bonds, stocks,   What if the owner is some high-frequency algorithm that buys and sells bonds and stocks in fractions of a second? When the company decides to pay dividends, does it literally track   down every single owner of that stock and deposit x cents per share in   that person's bank account? (This sounds absolutely absurd and seems   like it would be a logistical nightmare). In Stocks, the dividends are issued periodically. The dividend date is declared well in advance. As on end of the day on Dividend date, the list of individuals [or entities] who own the stock is available with the Stock-Exchange / Registrar of the companies. To this list the dividends are credited in next few days / weeks via banking channel. Most of this is automated. What if the owner is some high-frequency algorithm that buys and sells bonds and stocks in fractions of a second? On bonds, things work slightly differently. An Bond is initially issued for say 95 [discount of 5%] and payment of 100 after say 5 years. So when the person sells it after an year, he would logically look to get a price of 96. Of course there are other factors that could fetch him a price of 94.50 or 95.50. So every change in ownership factors in the logical rate of interest. The person who submits in on maturity gets 100.  For the homeowner, I'm assuming he / she still makes mortgage payments to the initial bank they got the mortgage from, even if the bank no longer ""owns"" the mortgage. In this case, does the trader on the secondary market who owns the mortgage also come back to that bank to collect his interest payment? This depends on how the original financial institution sells the mortgage to new institutions. Generally the homeowner would keep paying initial financial institution and they would then take a margin and pay the secondary investor. If this was collateral-ized as Mortgage backed security, it is a very different story." It's unclear what you're asking. When I originally read your question, it seemed that you had closed out one options position and opened another. When I read your question the second time, it seemed that you were writing a second option while the first was still open. In the second case, you have one covered and one naked position. The covered call will expire worthless, the naked call will expire in the money. How your broker will resolve that is a question best left for them, but my expectation is that they will assign the non-worthless calls. Whereas, if both options expired in the money, you would be assigned and you would have to come up with the additional shares (and again, that depends on how your broker works). In general, for both cases, your net is the premiums you received, plus the difference between strike price and the price that you paid for the stock, minus any cost to close out the position. So whether you make a profit is very much dependent on how much you received for your premiums. Scenario #1: close first call, write second: Scenario #2: write covered + naked, one expires worthless Scenario #3: write covered + naked, both expire in the money Disclaimer: the SEC does not consider me a financial/investment advisor, so this is not financial/investment advice "There is no simple answer to your question.  It depends on many things, perhaps most notably what college your daughter ends up going to and what kind of aid you hope to receive. Your daughter will probably fill out the FAFSA as part of her financial aid application.  Here is one discussion of what parental assets ""count"" towards the Expected Family Contribution on the FAFSA.  You can find many similar pages by googling.  Retirement accounts and primary residence are notable categories that do not count.  So, if you were looking to reduce your ""apparent"" assets for aid purposes, dumping money into your mortgage or retirement account is a possibility. However, you should be cautious when doing this type of gaming, because it's not always clear exactly how it will affect financial aid.  For one thing, ""financial aid"" includes both grants and loans.  Everyone wants grants, but sometimes increasing your ""eligibility"" may just make you (or your daughter) eligible for larger loans, which may not be so great. Also, each college has its own system for allocating financial aid.  Individual schools may ask for more detailed information (such as the CSS Profile).  So strategies for minimizing your apparent assets that work for one school may not work for others.  Some elite schools with large endowments have generous aid policies that allow even families with sizable incomes to pay little or nothing (e.g., Stanford waives tuition for most families with incomes under $125,000). You should probably research the financial aid policies of schools your daughter is interested in.  It can be helpful to talk to financial aid advisors at colleges, as well as high school counselors, not to mention general financial advisors if you really want to start getting technical about what assets to move around.  Needless to say, it all begins with talking with your daughter about her thoughts on where to go." A couple of good books I enjoyed and found very understandable (regarding the stock market): As for investment information you can get lost for days in Investopedia.  Start in the stock section and click around. The tutorials here (free) give a good introduction to different financial topics. Regarding theoretical knowledge: start with what you know well, like your career or your other interests.  You'll get a running start that way. Beyond that, it depends on what area of finance you want to start with.  If it's your personal finances, I and a lot of other bloggers write about it all the time.  Any of the bloggers on my blogroll (see my profile for the link) will give you a good perspective.  If you want to go head first into planning your financial life, take a look at Brett Wilder's The Quiet Millionaire.  It's very involved and thorough. And, of course, ask questions here. Hello,  I'm​ very interested in learning money. I used the search function, which led me to Investopedia, and already I'm learning a bunch.  Could you recommend me some introductory reading on finance and economics? I have no education on this subject, and I realise that reading isn't anywhere near having a good formal education, but some knowledge is better than none.  I'm looking to put this knowledge towards understanding what is a an enormous organ of power, and gaining the ability to recognise opportunities and profit.  So yeah, economics and finance, but I will study anything you throw my way, so the more the better. Especially because investments and accounting also seem interesting and useful.  P.S.: I'm European, if this makes a difference in what content will be relevant to me.  Thank you for reading this. My two cents:   I, like many people in finance, got into it for the money. However, I like many other people, found myself liking it for intrinsic reasons once I got into it.   I genuinely enjoy learning about financial theory, economics, understanding how global markets work, following the different story lines for the EU/US/Asian economies, working on financial models, reading the WSJ, keeping up to date on new earning releases, analyzing investments, learning about companies/industries, etc.  But I never would have found out that I liked these things unless I had chosen to study them and the only reason I chose to study them in the first place was because I wanted to make money. I'd take an intro finance class and see if it seems like something that could grow on you. When you register for the exam, the CFA Institute sends you the CFA curriculum (a self-contained set of books and practice problems - it's +2,000 pages per exam).   You can have zero knowledge of finance, study the given material, and then pass the exams. This being said, it will help if you begin to develop a passion for financial markets as you learn and try to apply your lessons.  Yes, I believe the CFA Charter (or pursuit of it) is a good signal to prospective employers especially if you are trying to make a career switch.