Essential Personal Finance: A Practical Guide for Students

Young people face unprecedented financial challenges: rising student debt, stiff competition for jobs, barriers to home ownership, dwindling state benefits and prospects of a longer working life.Essential Personal Finance is a guide to all the key areas of personal finance: budgeting, managing debt, savings and investments, insurance, securing a home and laying the foundations for retirement. It provides an introduction to some of the essential foundations of a modern undergraduate finance qualification, including:the nature of financial institutions, markets and economic policy that shape the opportunities and decisions individuals facethe range of financial assets available to households, risk-return trade-off, basics of portfolio construction and impact of taxthe importance of the efficient market hypothesis and modern portfolio theory in shaping investment strategies and the limitations of these approachesbehavioural finance as a key to understanding factors influencing individual