Several years ago, I said that I wanted to write a book about personal finance. That idea never really got off the ground, but my vision was to develop a resource that would have individual chapters that would build on each other so a person could go from money dummy to financially savvy. Great vision, but I never did it.

Well, it looks like a professor out at BYU has done what I had envisioned, and best of all he has made all of his materials available for free. Dr. Bryan Sudweeks, CFA, is a professor of finance at BYU who has developed an online course in personal finance aimed at people of different experience and education levels, which can be found at personalfinance.byu.edu. The lessons are very logically laid out and are easy to follow. There is online text, PowerPoint presentations, and even PDF copies of the lessons in book form if you want to download everything at once. Best of all, it is free of charge and free of bias that you often see at other personal finance tutorial sites.

It is worth noting that BYU is a university sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which means that the material is written from a Mormon perspective and Mormons are the primary target audience. However, the material is based on sound financial principles, and readers of any religion could learn a great deal from the materials.

I am certainly very impressed with the material, so much so that I am adding a link to the site in the sidebar under Cool Sites. As I read through the lessons I will also likely share insights I have gained to highlight the great work that has been done with this.

I found out about the site from an article in LDS Church News. For a great discussion of the site, see the article here.