Economics and Personal Finance Basics
Financial literacy is not knowing what to buy. It is the ability to run the numbers yourself and test whether a claim adds up. The more financial information AI pours out, the more these basics become your yardstick for judgment.
Words like compound interest, real return, and equal monthly payments come up every day at the bank counter, in ads, and in the news, yet few people ever get the chance to actually calculate them. This course turns those words into formulas you can work out yourself. Once you know the formulas, you can check for yourself how big a promise "a guaranteed 10% a year" really is, or how much the interest changes depending on how a loan is repaid.
The course runs in this order: money and time (Lessons 1–2), managing money in daily life (Lessons 3–4), institutions and rules (Lessons 5–6), investment products and risk (Lessons 7–8), and how to filter what you hear (Lessons 9–10). It reuses percentages (Lesson 2), exponents (Lesson 5), and statistics (Lesson 8) from the Math Basics course, and the final lesson covers how to verify financial information you get from AI.
This course does not recommend investments or products. All interest rates, inflation rates, and returns in the lessons are hypothetical numbers for practice, and Korean rules such as taxes and deposit protection are summarized only in outline, with the reference year (2026) stated. Rules can change, so check official guidance before making real decisions.
- Anyone starting a working life and managing a salary, savings, and loans on their own for the first time
- Anyone who wants to know how news about interest rates, inflation, and exchange rates connects to their own life
- Anyone who wants to use numbers to filter out "guaranteed high return" ads and invitations to stock-tip chat rooms
- Anyone who wants to build the habit of checking financial information from AI or the internet instead of taking it at face value
Lessons
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1LESSON
⏳ The Time Value of Money and Compound Interest: How Time Grows Money
Money comes with a price tag called time. Compounding means interest earns interest, so the gap with simple interest widens the longer you wait, and running the same idea backward gives you today's value of a future amount.
17 min -
2LESSON
🛒 Interest, Inflation, and Real Returns: More Money vs. More Buying Power
To see how much your purchasing power actually grew, take out taxes and then inflation. The exact real return is (1 + nominal) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1; nominal minus inflation is only an estimate.
17 min -
3LESSON
🧾 Budgets and Emergency Funds: Seeing Where Money Goes and Building a Cushion
A budget splits the flow of money into fixed costs, variable costs, irregular expenses, and savings; an emergency fund is the cushion that carries you when that flow breaks. There is no one-size-fits-all size for an emergency fund, so you set it yourself from your essential living costs and your own risk factors.
17 min -
4LESSON
🏦 Loans and Credit: How You Repay Changes What You Pay
The cost of a loan is set not only by the interest rate but also by the repayment method, fees, and the risk of rate changes. Under the same terms, the faster you repay the principal, the less total interest you pay, and comparisons should use the total cost including fees.
18 min -
5LESSON
🏛️ Tax Basics: Earned Income and Investment Income
Tax is charged not on everything you earn but on taxable income after deductions, at a different rate for each bracket. Once you know this structure, you can show with a calculation why a misconception like "a raise can lower your take-home pay" is wrong.
18 min -
6LESSON
☂️ How Insurance Works: The Math of Sharing Risk
Insurance is a system in which many people each pay a little to cover the large losses that hit a few. For the policyholder the expected value is usually negative, but it can still be a sensible way to guard against a large loss you could not absorb.
17 min -
7LESSON
📈 Stocks, Bonds, Funds, and ETFs: How They Differ
Stocks, bonds, funds, and ETFs earn money in different ways and carry differently shaped risks. Once you know how they are built, you can compare them by "what am I actually buying?" rather than by the advertising.
18 min -
8LESSON
⚖️ Diversification and Risk: Why Risk and Return Travel Together
Risk is how much results swing and how likely you are to lose money. Recovering from a loss takes a bigger gain, and mixing things that move differently can reduce the overall swings, but it does not make risk disappear.
18 min -
9LESSON
🚨 Fraud and Hype: Filtering Them Out with Numbers
A pitch that promises both "high returns" and "guaranteed principal" contradicts the relationship between risk and return we saw in Lesson 8. Your strongest defense is the habit of calculating the promised numbers yourself and checking the company through official channels.
18 min -
10LESSON
📰 Reading Economic News: Understanding Indicators and Checking AI Answers
The numbers in economic news read correctly once you know what they are compared with and what date they refer to. Check financial information from AI the same way: ask for the source and reference date, compare it with official statistics, and calculate it yourself.
19 min