The course
Learning about money
Money obeys four mechanisms, and they are the same everywhere: a budget is a subtraction, a debt is a dated commitment, interest is the price of time, an insurance policy is a list of conditions. The rest is product names that change every five years.
Three ways in, one course
Where to start
01
Your first money
For anyone starting to have some: where it goes without being noticed, how to keep control, and why starting early changes everything.
Open02
Before you sign
For anyone with a loan, a subscription or an insurance policy in front of them: what to read, in what order, and the sentences that should make you put the pen down.
Open03
Talking about money
For the teacher, the parent, the youth worker: a session that holds, the words that land, and the mistakes that lose the room in two minutes.
Open
The four mechanisms, on one page
A budget is a subtraction
What comes in, minus what leaves without a decision, minus what you choose. What remains is called disposable income, and it is the only line that says whether a budget holds. A fixed cost is decided once and paid every month: that is why what is saved once on a fixed cost is saved twelve times over a year.
Do the sum with your own figures
A debt is a dated commitment
Borrowing is not a fault: it is buying time, and time has a price. That price is not in the monthly payment, it is in the total. Two offers at the same rate do not cost the same if one runs twice as long, and, for the same amount at the same rate, a gentler monthly payment is always a more expensive debt.
Interest is the price of time
The same formula grows savings and swells a debt. Its force does not come from the rate but from the length of time: that is what makes a small amount invested early more powerful than a large amount invested late, and an overdraft of a few days more expensive than a loan of a few years. According to the OECD, recorded in 2022-2023 across 39 countries and economies, only 42% of adults answer a question on compound interest correctly: it is the most profitable idea to understand in this whole course.
An insurance policy is a list of conditions
You think you are buying protection; what you are really buying is three numbers and a list: the depreciation, the excess, the cap, and the exclusions. A low premium often hides a high excess, and the gap shows up on the day of the claim, which is to say too late to change your mind.
The fifth thing, which is not a mechanism
You can hold a budget, understand a rate, read a contract, and lose in one evening what took ten years to build. Financial traps do not target knowledge: they target fear, urgency, loneliness and hope. They are part of the course just as much as the rest, with their signs and their reflexes.
Why this course holds everywhere
A percentage is worked out the same way in Dakar, in Lyon and in Dhaka. A running debt costs everywhere. A salesperson who pushes pushes everywhere. This core is therefore universal, and it is written to be read from anywhere.
What changes from one country to the next are the schemes: the caps, the support, the legal deadlines, the authority you report to. Those elements never go into a lesson: they live as modules, on the Your country page, each with its public source and the date it was checked. Anyone whose country has no module yet learns the whole course and loses nothing.
Every technical word is explained in the glossary, with a worked example you can redo in your head. How this course is written and checked is set out in Our method.