Stanford Personal Finance Courses

Financial Wellness for a Healthy, Long Life

WELLNESS 183 | 2025-2026 Winter | 1 unit

Instructor: Angela Amarillas

This course will ground you in the knowledge, skills, and habits you need to identify and achieve your financial goals. We will infuse behavior science and psychology into our exploration of personal finance concepts (e.g., credit, debt, saving, and investing) to build your financial capability in the areas of managing money, planning ahead, making choices, and getting help. By the end of the quarter, you will have a personalized toolkit to create and refine actionable plans for increasing your financial well-being now and throughout your healthy, long life.

Introduction to Financial Decision-Making

ECON 43 | 2025-2026 Spring | 5 units

Instructors: Michael Boskin, Annamaria Lusardi

The purpose of this course is for you to obtain both a broad overview of the role of finance in society and your role in it, and a degree of greater comfort that you know how to approach the major financial decisions you will confront. Your journey through life will require many financial decisions, some easily predictable now, that will heavily influence the quality of your life, your financial security, your ability to withstand unanticipated burdens arising from the vagaries of your and your family's lives, and to keep open desirable options on how you lead your life. The course will use a variety of approaches to illustrate and analyze archetypical situations, emphasizing both sound decisions and financial mistakes that are all too common and can have major damaging results. From illustrative examples and case studies, to historical and statistical evidence and some simple analytical tools, the course is designed to help you develop some straightforward understanding of basic financial concepts, the people and institutions you will interact with in making such decisions, and advantages and disadvantages of alternative approaches for individuals and society. Topics include making a financial plan and budget, managing money, obtaining and using credit and loans, saving, investing in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, and other assets, venture capital and private equity, purchasing insurance, purchasing vs. renting a home, getting a mortgage, taxes, inflation and inflation protection, financial markets and more.