Description

Financial planning is the part nobody teaches. Not the investing, which gets all the attention, but the underlying work: knowing what you spend, what you owe, what you are actually saving toward, and whether the pieces fit together. These are free tools from organizations with nothing to sell you. Start here before you pay anyone, including us.

• CFPB Financial Well-Being Questionnaire. Ten questions, scored, developed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It measures how you are actually doing rather than what your account balance says. Useful as a starting point and useful again a year later. Link

• Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey. What households actually spend, broken out by category, age, and income. Most budgeting advice is built on assumptions. This is built on data, and it is the right benchmark when you are trying to figure out whether your numbers are reasonable. Link

• FDIC Money Smart. A full financial education curriculum, free, covering budgeting, credit, banking, and borrowing. Built for adult learners and genuinely well designed. Link

• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Free Financial Planning Tools. Resources Include: required minimum distribution calculator, compound interest calculator, saving goal calculator, social security retirement planner, investment professional background check, EDGAR, company financial disclosures, fund analyzer. Link

Description

The hardest part of investing is the first hour, when the vocabulary is unfamiliar and every explanation seems to assume you already know something. These five start from zero. None of them sells anything, and none assumes you have money to invest yet.

• SEC, Saving and Investing: A Roadmap to Your Financial Security. A free booklet from the SEC that starts with figuring out what you have before it talks about what to buy. Roughly fifty pages, written for someone who has never opened a brokerage account. Link

• FINRA Investing Basics. Short explanations of the actual building blocks: what a stock is, what a bond is, what a fund is, what risk means in practice. Read the section on diversification twice. It is the one idea that does the most work. Link

• Department of Labor, Savings Fitness. A workbook, not an article, aimed at people who are saving toward retirement without a clear plan. It walks you through goals, cash flow, and how employer plans fit in. Link

• Khan Academy, Personal Finance. Free video courses covering interest, investment vehicles, taxes, and retirement accounts. Useful if you learn better by watching than reading. Link

• MyMoney.gov. The federal government's clearinghouse, organized around five basic actions: earn, save and invest, protect, spend, borrow. Deliberately simple, and free of any sales angle. Link

• Bogleheads wiki is among the best free beginner material anywhere. Named after Vanguard founder, John Bogle, this resource aligns with learning about low cost, passive investing strategies, something we speak about with our clients. Link

Description

Retirement planning is mostly arithmetic that nobody walks you through: what you will actually have, what you will actually spend, which account to draw from first, and when to claim Social Security. These are free tools from agencies and nonprofits with nothing to sell. Run your own numbers before anyone runs them for you.

• Social Security Administration, my Social Security account. Your actual earnings record and benefit estimates at different claiming ages, based on your real history rather than averages. The difference between claiming at 62 and at 70 is substantial and permanent, and this is where you see it in your own numbers. Check the earnings record itself too, since errors happen and they are easier to fix early. Link

• Medicare.gov. Coverage options, enrollment windows, and plan comparison. Enrollment timing matters more than almost anything else here, because missing your initial window can trigger penalties that last for life. Worth reading well before you turn 65. Link

• IRS retirement plan pages. Required minimum distribution rules and current contribution limits, direct from the source rather than someone's summary. RMD ages have changed twice in recent years, so older articles are frequently wrong. Link

• Department of Labor, Taking the Mystery Out of Retirement Planning. A workbook for people roughly ten years out. It walks through projecting income, estimating expenses, and identifying the gap, which is the calculation most people avoid. Link Here are some wonderful retirement planning worksheets. Link

Description

Running a business teaches you how quickly the business crowds out everything else, including your own financial future. The resources below cover both sides: keeping the business healthy, and making sure the owner is not the last person to get paid. All free, none of them selling you anything.

• SBA Learning Platform and Local Assistance directory. Free courses on cash flow, pricing, and financing, plus a tool that finds your nearest SBA resource partner, including the Small Business Development Centers and SCORE chapters, where the counseling is free and the counselors have usually run businesses themselves. Link

• IRS Small Business and Self-Employed Tax Center. Quarterly estimated tax rules, self employment tax, entity classifications, and what is actually deductible. Also the retirement plan pages, which matter more than most owners realize. A SEP IRA or Solo 401(k) can shelter far more than an IRA, and the Solo 401(k) allows contributions as both employee and employer. Link

• SBA and IRS guidance on retirement plans for small employers. Most owners assume offering a plan is expensive and complicated. For a business with no employees, or just a spouse, it usually is not. This is the single most commonly missed planning opportunity among self employed people. Link

• SCORE templates and mentoring. Free financial projection templates, cash flow worksheets, and one on one mentoring from experienced business people. The templates alone save hours. Link

• For someone interested in starting or growing a business, the Kauffman Foundation offers a free set of mini-courses on various topics related to self-employment from marketing, to finance, to everything else a business owner may need to get started and get ahead. Link

Description

Educators get handed a retirement system that nobody explains. A pension with rules you did not choose, a 403(b) sold by whoever had a table in the break room, sometimes a 457(b) that almost nobody mentions, and Social Security rules that changed recently enough that half the advice online is now wrong. These are free, and none of them is selling you an annuity.

• 403bwise. A nonprofit built specifically around the problem that most 403(b) (a) plans are dominated by high cost insurance products. They rate vendors, explain what you are actually paying, and maintain state by state information. If you have a 403(b) and have never looked at its fees, start here. Link

• IRS 403(b) and 457(b) plan pages. Current contribution limits and the rules straight from the source. Two things worth knowing: if your employer offers both a 403(b) and a 457(b), the limits are generally separate, so you may be able to contribute the maximum to each. And the 403(b) has a special catch-up provision for employees with fifteen years of service that most people have never heard of. The IRS has great information about the differences of these various plans. Link

Description

Calculators, worksheets, and planning tools you can use right now, free, from sources with nothing to sell you. Run your own numbers first. Whatever you find, you will be a better client to any adviser, including us, for having done it.

• Retirement

  SSA Retirement Estimator, using your actual earnings record rather than averages. Your state or city pension system's benefit estimator. The Department of Labor's Taking the Mystery Out of Retirement Planning workbook for projecting income against expenses. Link

• FINRA Fund Analyzer, which converts expense ratios into what they cost you in dollars over time. The SEC's compound interest calculator at Investor.gov. FINRA Broker Check and Investment Adviser Public Disclosure for checking anyone before you hire them. Link

• CFPB Financial Well-Being Questionnaire, ten scored questions measuring how you are actually doing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey for benchmarking your spending against real households. FDIC Money Smart, a full curriculum on budgeting, credit, and borrowing. Link

• IRS Tax Withholding Estimator, for anyone who gets a large refund every year and has not realized what that means. The IRS pages on contribution limits and required minimum distributions, direct rather than summarized. Link

• Estate planning worksheet. Link

Numbers beat anecdotes. These are studies and datasets from government agencies, universities, and nonprofit research organizations, covering what households actually earn, spend, save, and worry about. Useful when you are trying to figure out whether your situation is unusual or completely ordinary. Most of the time it turns out to be ordinary.

• Federal Reserve — Survey of Consumer Finances Household balance sheet data. Useful for seeing where you actually stand relative to households like yours, rather than relative to the anecdotes you hear. Link

• Employee Benefit Research Institute — Retirement Confidence Survey Long running annual survey on what workers and retirees expect versus what they experience. Link

• INRA Investor Education Foundation — National Financial Capability Study Data on financial literacy and behavior across demographics and states. Link

• Vanguard research center — Retirement and portfolio construction research, including their annual defined contribution plan data. Link

• Morningstar research — annual target date fund study. Link