FNCE20003: Introductory Personal Finance

"App challenge" assignment worth 10%, 1 hour MST worth 20%, 2 hour end of semester exam worth 70%

Introductory Personal Finance (IPF) is an entry point into becoming a financial advisor. I believe it contributes to some sort of certification for financial advisors, but I am unfamiliar with the industry.

It is worth noting I took this subject as a breadth, and do not have any experience with commerce with the exception of Finance 1. Thus those doing a B-COM may have a different experience with the subject.

Each lecture briefly covers one topic. The topics are:

• Financial well-being and financial planning
• Cash flow and budgeting
• Asset allocation and risk management + investing in shares
• Securing credit
• Investing in property
• Superannuation and retirement
• Finance and ageing
• Insurance
• "Emergency finance"
• Providing financial advice
• Where to for personal finance - a summary lecture

This has been my only subject with 2 hour lectures, which I found extremely tedious. Generally, the 1st hour Murawski uses describing various statistics. Often this hour is rather depressing, as he highlights various problems that the financial industry faces. The 2nd hour is largely focused on describing the various financial decisions within each topic, e.g. different types of shares, different types of insurance, different types of superannuation contributions etc.

I found that most of the learning occurred in the tutorials.

Overall, I have found the content of this subject to be fairly practical - it pertains to decisions we will all likely make in the future. However, much of the time the content is also common sense. I also found it to be fairly dry, but no more so than Finance 1.

The assignment was very frustrating. It was a group assignment that involved designing an app that is intended to aid people with their finances. The assignment included describing the function of the app; who would use the app and why, including an estimate of the number of users; how the app would function, sufficient for a programmer to develop the app; an estimate of the timeline; and an estimate of the financial plan for development of the app.
This assignment was only introduced last semester. I am unaware if it will continue to be used.

The MST comprised 34 MCQs, most of which were taken from the past MST. The MST was very easy, and most people would have finished at around 34 minutes, when we had an hour to complete the MST.

The final exam comprised 9 long-answer questions. There was a mix of calculation questions and extended response questions.Given that questions on the MST were largely taken from the past MST, I assumed that this would also be the case with the final exam, and decided just to memorise the questions/answers on the past exam. However, this was

Yes, with screen capture.

Carsten Murawski

Semester 1 2015 past MST available. Semester 1 2014 past exam available, and practice questions. These were released on the LMS before each of their corresponding assessments.

3.5/5

"Recommended" textbook: Taylor, S. and Juchau, R. Financial Planning in Australia. 2015 Essentials Edition. LexisNexis, Chatswood. 2015.

Not needed, although I probably would have done better had I completed the readings at least once.

Weekly: 1 x 2 hour lecture, 1 x 1 hour tutorial

2016 semester 1

81% - H1