Courses

MONEY-01Your Money, and Who Decides

Credit, and the Decisions Made About You

Somebody you have never met keeps a file about how you pay, sells it to people deciding whether to lend to you, and is allowed to do that. This course is not about how to build good credit. It is about how a credit decision is actually made: what data feeds it, who is allowed to look, what the decider must tell you, and what you can do when the record is wrong. It starts before any of it is about scores, with a calendar, because the ordinary failure is not overspending but timing. Money is owed on one date and arrives on another, and closing that gap is what every consumer credit product sells. Then the vocabulary that the law, rather than the industry, defines. A creditor that receives a completed application does one of three things, and only one of them has a legal name: adverse action, defined to its edges in Regulation B, because the paperwork rights attach to the defined term and not to the feeling of being turned down. Then the file itself, which the Fair Credit Reporting Act defines as a communication bearing on your credit worthiness, credit standing, credit capacity, character, general reputation, personal characteristics, or mode of living, and which a consumer reporting agency assembles for monetary fees. Who may buy it is a closed list in the statute that ends with the words and no other. What may appear in it, and for how long, is a second list, and most adverse items fall off after seven years. Then the score, which the statute defines as a numerical value derived from a statistical tool used to predict the likelihood of certain credit behaviors, which means it is a prediction rather than a measurement, that there is more than one of them, and that the four key factors printed beside it are the part you can act on. The centre of the course is a piece of paper you can hold: the adverse action notice, which federal regulation requires to be specific and to indicate the principal reasons, and which may not simply say you failed to reach a score cutoff. Read beside this catalog's own course on federal farm credit, where a government gate had to state its eligibility standard in statute, the parallel is exact and one level down. Then the dispute: a reasonable reinvestigation, free of charge, inside thirty days, with the company that supplied the item put on notice within five business days and obliged to investigate too. Then the price, and why the annual percentage rate exists at all, which is so that two offers can be compared. The course closes on the method rather than on a table, because model versions and program terms move while statutes do not, and it ends by having you read your own record. It is information about how institutions decide, not advice about your money, and it says so in three separate lessons.

MONEY-02Your Money, and Who Decides

Banking, and Who Has No Bank

A generic banking course teaches you how to open a checking account. This one teaches what a bank account actually is, what it costs, what happens when you do not have one, and what fills the gap. It starts with the deposit contract, because the thing you call your money is legally a claim against a company, and the insurance that backs that claim has a structure worth learning even though its dollar cap has a date on it. Then the two gates. The first is the identity rule at 31 CFR 1020.220, which requires a bank to collect four things before it opens an account for you, and which does not say the words driver's license or Social Security number, though almost everyone believes it does. The second is the gate almost nobody knows exists: banks screen applicants through companies like ChexSystems and Early Warning Services, those companies are consumer reporting agencies under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and that single legal fact gives a rejected applicant a right to be told which company was consulted, a right to a free copy of the file, and a right to dispute what is in it. Then the cost structure, taught as a price rather than a rule: a monthly fee waived above a balance threshold is the same account sold at two prices, sorted by who has the least. Overdraft is taught from the opt-in regulation and from the rule Congress nullified in May 2025, because a course that described that rule in the present tense would be wrong. Then the substitute market, priced rather than scolded: money orders, check cashing, prepaid cards and payment apps, with the fees the FDIC and USPS publish, and with the reason a household with an unpredictable balance rationally prefers a fee it can see to a fee it cannot predict. The evidence spine is the FDIC's own biennial survey, which asks unbanked households why, publishes their answers, and shows that the single most cited reason is not having enough money to meet a minimum balance. The course ends with distance, with what saving actually looks like across the population according to the Federal Reserve, and with five things you can do to read your own account, none of which is advice about what to do with your money.

MONEY-03Your Money, and Who Decides

Cash Flow, and When the Money Actually Moves

A bill is due on the first and the paycheck lands on the third. That is not a budgeting failure, it is two calendars that were set by different people under different rules, and this course is about those rules. It teaches no budgeting technique at all, on purpose: budgeting has no mechanism, no decision-maker and no recourse, while timing has all three and every one of them is public. When money arrives is a federal schedule. The Expedited Funds Availability Act and Regulation CC say how soon a bank must let you use a deposit, and the answer depends on what you deposited, where you deposited it, and what time of day the bank says its day ended. Cash handed to a teller is one rule, a payroll direct deposit is another, a government check is a third, and an ordinary check is a fourth, with six named exceptions that can extend any of them and a written notice owed to you whenever one is used. When money leaves is a different kind of rule and a much shorter one. The Uniform Commercial Code says a bank may charge items to your account in any order it finds convenient, which means the same four payments on the same day can produce one overdraft or three depending on a sequencing choice you never see. The course works that arithmetic rather than complaining about it, because the arithmetic is the part you can act on. Then the rails: cash, check, an automated clearing house credit, a card, a wire, and instant payment, six ways money moves with six different clocks, and only some of them are what the availability rule calls an electronic payment. Then the paycheck itself, where the arithmetic surprises people: weekly is fifty-two paydays a year, biweekly is twenty-six, semimonthly is twenty-four, and biweekly and semimonthly are not the same thing even though both are often called twice a month. Federal law sets a regular pay day and does not set how often it comes; your state does, and the statute has a number in it. A Social Security payment date is set by a published rule keyed to a birth date, which means it can be computed a year ahead. The course closes on the two questions worth knowing the answers to: which of these timings is a legal duty with a remedy attached, and which is merely the way a bank has chosen to run its day. It ends by having you map your own dates, request your own bank's availability policy, which any person may ask for in writing, and read your own state's payday statute. It is information about how the payment system keeps time, not advice about your money, and it says so in three separate lessons.

MONEY-04Your Money, and Who Decides

Predatory Products, Priced

A scam and a predatory product are not the same object, and confusing them costs people money twice. A scam is illegal on its face, and the remedy is fraud law. A predatory product is legal, sold by a licensed business under a written contract, with its price printed on the page, and the remedy is arithmetic. This course prices the legal ones. It starts with the tool the law itself requires, the annual percentage rate, which exists under the Truth in Lending Act so that two offers stated in different units can be compared, and it teaches the conversion that turns a flat fee into one. Then the small-dollar loan, where the cost is not in the first loan but in the renewal, a mechanism the Supreme Court described in a single sentence about fine print and a federal jury in New York found a lender had understated by a factor of nearly ten. Then rent-to-own, where the total of payments can approach or exceed twice the cash price, and where no annual percentage rate appears at all, because Regulation Z's definition of a credit sale turns on whether the customer agreed to pay, and a lease you may end at any time is not that agreement. Then the products that attach to money you are already owed: a tax refund that federal law holds until a stated date for the households most likely to be offered a loan against it, and overdraft, which is priced. Then the line that decides who bears a loss when money leaves an account, which is the most useful thing this course teaches. Regulation E defines an unauthorized electronic fund transfer as one initiated by someone other than you without your authority, and the error-resolution machinery, the liability caps and the burden of proof on the institution all hang on that definition being met. A transfer you were tricked into making yourself does not meet it. The course closes on who is targeted, taught from public enforcement records rather than from assertion, and on how to read one: a complaint is an allegation, a stipulated order is a settlement, and a jury verdict is a finding, and the difference matters. It gives no financial advice, prints no national rate, dates every figure, and teaches you to find your own state's rule rather than trusting a table.

MONEY-05Your Money, and Who Decides

Taxes, and the Money Taken Before You See It

For most working people in the United States, federal income tax is not a bill that arrives. It is money that is already gone, taken by an employer under a duty the law places on the employer rather than on you, before the pay statement is printed. This course is not about how to do your taxes. It is about the machine that decides how much is held, what the document you sign actually is, and who the rules land on. It starts with the two separate deductions on one pay statement, taken under two different chapters of the Internal Revenue Code, only one of which comes back to you as a credit at the end of the year. Then the withholding certificate, the single dial an employee controls, and the regulation that renamed it when the allowances it was built around were removed. Then the reason a refund is not a gift: the statute says withheld tax is allowed to you as a credit, so an overpayment is your own money returning, while a refundable credit is something else entirely and the law is explicit about which is which. Then the return as a document with legal consequences, signed under penalties of perjury by force of a single sentence of the Code, starting a three-year clock to assess that becomes six years on a large omission and never runs at all on a false return or on no return. Then filing status, which is not a preference but a determination made as of the last day of the year, and which on a joint return makes each spouse liable for the whole tax rather than half. The centre of the course is the place where the tax system stops collecting revenue and starts paying money out: the refundable credit, defined by a sentence saying the excess shall be considered an overpayment, and the earned income credit, which is conditioned on having worked and is the largest cash safety-net program in the country. Then the date Congress wrote for those credits and for nobody else, which holds the refunds of the lowest-earning filers until mid-February and is the window every refund-advance product is priced against. Then free filing, which turns out to be a private contract with an income limit derived from a percentile rather than a statute, a volunteer program born in 1969, and a government-built filing tool that was suspended. It closes on examination: what an audit legally is, what clock it starts, and what published research using named methods found about who is selected, including a disparity concentrated in exactly the credit this course spends a section on. It gives no tax advice, prints no current bracket or credit amount, dates every figure, and says so in three separate lessons.

MONEY-06Your Money, and Who Decides

Housing: the Lease, the Loan Estimate, and the Map

A housing decision is not a choice between two lifestyles. It is a choice between two contracts, and almost every term that matters is already written on a document somebody is legally required to hand you. This course will not tell you whether to rent or to buy, and it gives no financial advice. It teaches the machinery instead. A lease buys a right to occupy for a term; a mortgage loan buys money and pledges the property back as security, which is why the early payments are almost all interest and why the schedule that proves it is arithmetic anyone can do. Renting is governed by state law, which means there is no national answer about deposits, notice or eviction, so the course teaches how to find the statute that governs your own address and demonstrates the method on one labelled state rather than printing a table that would be wrong in forty-nine places. Buying is governed by two federal forms designed to be laid side by side: the Loan Estimate, which a creditor must deliver within three business days of an application, itself defined as six specific pieces of information, and the Closing Disclosure, which the consumer must receive at least three business days before consummation. Between them sit the good-faith rules that decide which quoted costs may move and by how much, the annual percentage rate that the form itself says is not your interest rate, and the total interest percentage, which states what the loan costs as a share of what was borrowed. The comparison of renting against buying is then done honestly, in the same units, over a stated horizon, with the transaction costs on both ends counted, because the familiar claim that renting throws money away is a conclusion with no arithmetic attached. The last third turns to valuation and to the record. An appraisal is an opinion of value, you are entitled to a free copy of every one, and appraising is written into the Fair Housing Act's own definition of a covered transaction. Then the map: racially restrictive covenants are still in the county land records, a 1948 Supreme Court decision made them judicially unenforceable without erasing them, a university project has mapped hundreds of them in one city, and in at least one state a statute says exactly what an owner may record to strike one from their own deed. It closes by having you read one real document about your own housing.

MONEY-07Your Money, and Who Decides

Retirement: the Plan, the Fee Disclosure, and the Floor

This is not a course about how to invest, and it will not tell you what to buy, how much to save, or when to start. It teaches the machinery instead, because the machinery is public and the advice would be a guess. Start with the fact that decides everything else: a workplace retirement plan exists only because an employer chose to sponsor one, so whether you have access is a fact about the labour market rather than about your discipline, and the federal survey that measures it finds the gap running from 91 percent access in the best-paid quarter of private-sector occupations down to 49 percent in the lowest-paid quarter. From there the course reads the documents. An employee pension benefit plan has a statutory definition, and the plan document, not a website, decides what your employer contributes and when it becomes yours; the vesting schedules an employer may choose from are printed in the statute itself, your own deferrals are nonforfeitable from the day you make them, and what happens to the rest when you leave is a term you can look up rather than a rumour. Fees compound in exactly the way balances do, and one regulation requires the plan to hand you a disclosure that says so, to state each investment's cost both as a percentage and as a dollar amount per thousand invested, and to tell you at least quarterly what you were actually charged. The tax half is taught as a timing choice rather than a product choice, and the annual figures are taught as a method: a base amount fixed in statute, an adjustment made each year, and the notice where the current number is published. Then Social Security, taught from the statute rather than from a brochure: forty quarters of coverage, an earnings record that becomes conclusive three years, three months and fifteen days after the year it covers, thirty-five years of indexed earnings, and a benefit formula that pays 90 percent of the first slice of average indexed monthly earnings and 15 percent of the last. The course closes on the question almost nobody asks and everybody should: which of the people talking to you is legally required to act in your interest, which is held to a different standard written in a different rule, and where the free public records are that let you check either one before you listen.

Surplus Funds Basics: Helping Homeowners Recover What Is Theirs

When a home sells at a tax or foreclosure auction for more than the debt against it, the extra money belongs to the former owner, and a great deal of it is never claimed. This course teaches where that money comes from and where it sits, what the Supreme Court settled in Tyler v. Hennepin County and what it did not, how to read a county surplus ledger, how to verify who is entitled, and how the claim is actually filed. It covers the honest economics of doing this as a service: the fee caps in Florida and Georgia, the fact that Texas prohibits a non-attorney from charging at all, the deadlines that end a claim, and the disclosure model that is both the ethical choice and the only one that works in all three states. It teaches the industry as it actually operates, including the practices that got the fee caps written, and it is honest about how much of the money in this field is made selling training rather than recovering funds. Built on statutes read directly and dated, with a method for researching any county rather than a summary table that goes stale. Not legal advice.