Finances and the life course

Martin Upton is your Lead Educator and guide through the course. He is Director of the True Potential Centre for the Public Understanding of Finance, based at The Open University Business School. He’ll meet you at the start of each week to tip you off about highlights and challenges, to remind you of what you’ve learned and to help you make the most of these four weeks of learning to manage your money.

As the course progresses you’ll also meet our team of mentors, who will respond to your comments and questions.

This course is one of eight available in the Business and Finance Fundamentals program. Successful completion of all eight (as evidenced by upgrading and receiving a Certificate of Achievement for each course when you become eligible each course) can lead to academic credit at Level 1 of The Open University’s Business Management BA degree, subject to registration and separate fee for a linked Open University assessment module.

Your financial profile

Some of the coolest features of the course are the financial challenges, planners and calculators you get to explore throughout the course. See how you score in the financial bad habits test, build up your personal budget and develop your own ‘fact find’ to take away at the end of the course. Your fact find is available to use throughout the course as a record of your goals and financial circumstances. You can download it now so that you’re ready to use it later this week. Record your own details and, if you wish, those of your partner.

This fact find is different from the documents you complete when acquiring financial products like investments and mortgages. The fact find for ‘Finance Fundamentals: Personal financial planning and budgeting’ is intended to provide a full summary of our personal financial circumstances. When acquiring specific financial products, your financial adviser or financial product provider (e.g. your bank) will only require details about your financial circumstances that are relevant to the financial product you are intending to acquire.

A note about financial advice

This course provides the information, frameworks and financial planning guidance needed to manage your finances and to assist in making financial decisions.

However, course contents do not constitute ‘advice’ with regard to which specific financial products you should use or which financial services providers you should do business with. Consequently the course educators and facilitators cannot answer questions about matters relating to such financial advice.

If you need specific individual financial advice, you should contact an authorised financial firm or financial adviser.

This course has been adapted from original material created by The Open University’s True Potential Centre for the Public Understanding of Finance, and was made possible thanks to the generous support of True Potential LLP.