Guide to Personal Finance

How this guide works

Most personal finance content is written to sell you something — a fund, a policy, a subscription, or a percentage of your savings. This guide is written by advisors who don't sell products at all, so it can be organized around what you're trying to decide rather than what someone is trying to move.

There are three layers to it:

Topic guides. One evergreen guide per topic — retirement, taxes, investing, insurance, and the rest. Each one covers how the topic works end to end and what the common decisions actually turn on. These are being written and published one at a time; the grid below shows which are live.
The glossary. Plain-English definitions of the vocabulary — 223 terms published so far, on the way to roughly two thousand. Use it when you hit a word in a plan document, a benefits portal, or a tax form and want a straight answer without a sales pitch attached. Browse the financial glossary.
Tools and comparisons. Calculators and side-by-side explainers for the decisions where seeing the numbers changes the answer — most obviously what different advisor fee structures cost you over a lifetime.

You don't have to read any of it in order. If you know what you're looking for, jump straight to the topic or the term.

Where to start

If you're not sure which topic you need, start with the three questions that sit underneath all of them. They're unglamorous, and they're the ones that decide most outcomes.

1. What do you actually own and owe?

Everything you own minus everything you owe is your net worth, and it is the single most useful number in personal finance because it moves in response to real decisions rather than to market noise. Writing it down once — accounts, balances, debts, rates — usually surfaces at least one thing you'd forgotten about, and it turns vague anxiety into a list you can work through.

2. What happens if income stops?

An emergency fund is what keeps a bad month from becoming a financial event — the thing that stops a car repair or a layoff from turning into high-interest debt or an early retirement withdrawal. How much you need depends on how stable your income is and who depends on it, which is why sensible people land on very different numbers. Insurance answers the same question for the losses too big to save your way out of.

3. Where should the next dollar go?

Once the bills are covered, most of personal finance is one repeated question: save, invest, or pay down debt? The financial order of operations is the common framework for answering it. Versions differ at the margins, but they share a spine — capture any employer retirement match first, clear high-interest debt, build the emergency fund, fill tax-advantaged accounts, then invest in a regular taxable account. The logic is return per dollar: a full employer match is an immediate return nothing else on the list can beat, and paying off high-rate debt is a guaranteed return that most investments can't promise.

That sequence optimizes for long-run growth and tax efficiency, so it handles medium-term goals — a house in four years, a career break — poorly. That's the point at which a general framework stops being enough and a financial plan built around your specific goals starts earning its keep.

Browse by topic

15 topics cover the ground between them. Topic guides are being written and published one at a time — where a guide isn't live yet, the tile takes you to that topic's glossary terms, which are already published and cover the vocabulary you'll meet in that area.

Tools and guides

The rest of what we publish for people managing their own money, or deciding whether to hire help.

Financial Glossary
223 personal finance terms defined in plain English, each reviewed by a credentialed planner and grouped by topic.
Fee Comparison Calculator
What a percentage-of-assets fee costs compared with a flat or hourly fee over time, including the growth those fees would otherwise have earned.
Finding a Financial Advisor: The Complete Guide
How advisors are paid, which credentials mean something, how to verify a firm's registration, and the questions worth asking before you hire anyone.
What Is Advice-Only Financial Planning?
The model this firm is built on: planners who are paid only for advice, and who never sell products or manage your money for a percentage.
Blog
Longer pieces on specific decisions, written by the same advisors.

How we keep this accurate

Getting personal finance wrong costs readers real money, so a few things about how this guide is produced are worth stating plainly.

Everything carries a named reviewer. Pages are reviewed by a credentialed planner — a CFP® professional, an Enrolled Agent, or both — whose name links to their profile, alongside the date the page was last updated.
Figures come from primary sources. Contribution limits, tax thresholds, and benefit rules are taken from the agencies that set them — the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the SEC — not from other people's summaries of them.
Dates are honest. We update the date on a page when its content substantively changes, not to make old content look fresh.
Nobody here is paid to recommend anything. AdviceOnly is a registered investment adviser and a Public Benefit Corporation, and its member advisors are fee-only fiduciaries paid solely by their clients. No commissions, no product manufacturers, no referral fees — so there's no financial reason for this guide to steer you anywhere in particular.

Found something wrong or out of date? Tell us — corrections to a money guide are worth more than politeness.