While reading this month’s issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine, I found that UC Irvine offers a free online course on the Fundamentals of Personal Financial Planning:

This course was produced by a generous grant from the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards and by the Distance Learning Center at the University of California, Irvine under the OpenCourseWare Initiative. The purpose is to make widely available to the general public a course designed to provide a comprehensive but easily understood overview of personal financial planning.

This course is not intended to replace the professional financial planner, but to help to make the general public better consumers of financial planning advice. It tries to help those who cannot afford extensive planning assistance to better understand how to define and reach their ...