Happy Christmas 2016!

Just wanted to take this opportunity to wish all of you a happy and peaceful Christmas, and a fulfilling and prosperous new year.

Even if you don’t celebrate the religious festival, I hope you enjoy the festive period. Thank you for your interest in Pounds and Sense. Without you, I really would be whistling in the wind!

Pounds and Sense is of course still very new, so I thought it might be helpful to list the posts I have made so far, in case you want to catch up with them over the holiday period. They are as follows:

Make Money and Help University Researchers with Prolific Academic – I’m a big fan of this website, which not only allows you to earn a few pounds helping researchers, but gives your little grey cells a workout into the bargain.

How I Scored a £1200 Mattress for just 10 Minutes’ Work as an Amazon Vine Reviewer – In this post I reveal the amazing range of products I have been able to obtain for free as an Amazon Vine reviewer. I also explain how you may be able to become a Vine Voice yourself, and suggest an alternative that is nearly as good to try in the meantime.

Sign Up Now for this Free Online Course on Managing Your Investments from FutureLearn – The course in question, which is run by The Open University, starts on 9 January. I’ve enrolled on it myself. Hope to see you there!

Save Money with Cashback Sites – You can save a lot of money on your online shopping with cashback sites, and even make money as well. Find out about the top two UK cashback sites in this post.

Get Money Off Gift Vouchers with Zeek – Zeek is an online platform for buying and selling gift vouchers. Right now they are running a special Christmas promotion where you get 10 percent cashback for every £100 worth of vouchers you buy (In addition to the discount of 4-15% on the face value of the vouchers themselves). Plus you can get an additional £5 off your first voucher purchase by signing up via the link in the post. What’s not to love?!

There will, of course, be many more posts to come on Pounds and Sense in the coming months, and I don’t want you to miss out! So please do sign up in the box on the right to receive notifications any time the blog is updated or when I have urgent and valuable information to pass on. You can also follow Pounds and Sense on Facebook, Twitter and other social media (again, click on the relevant icons in the right-hand column).

It only remains once again to wish you a wonderful Christmas. I will hope very much to see you regularly on Pounds and Sense in the new year.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

If you enjoyed this post, please link to it on your own blog or social media:

December 12, 2016

Sign Up Now for this Free Online Course on Managing Your Investments from Futurelearn

Nick Investing events 1 Comment

Futurelearn is a UK-based platform for short online courses from British and international universities. All Futurelearn courses are free and open to anyone in the world.

I thought you might like to know that a course titled Managing My Investments begins on 20 March 2017. It comes from The Open University. It will run for six weeks and you can enrol now if you wish.

Managing My Investments is intended for anyone with an interest in developing their personal financial skills to make good decisions when managing their investments and buying investment products. The course does not require any previous experience of this subject.

On the website, it says:

On this free online course, you’ll learn about different investment choices, the returns and risks associated with each, and the evidence about their historical performance. You’ll explore investment strategies, as well as the practicalities about involvement in personal finance markets. And you’ll look at how to avoid the individual and group behavioural traits that can impair effective investment decision making .

Throughout, the course will provide recent and current case studies on investment issues, to demonstrate how the ideas and issues explored in the course are reflected in the arena of personal investments.

The course is up-to-date and covers the current reforms to UK pensions due to be rolled out in 2015 – changes that will radically alter the way many people will use their pension savings as they move into retirement .

Managing My Investments aims to give you the knowledge and confidence to take charge of your investments and your financial future.

Finding Out More

The course is run by Martin Upton of the OU Business School (previously Treasurer of the Nationwide Building Society). It requires a commitment of around three hours a week.

For more information (including a video trailer) and to register, visit the Managing My Investments information page of the Futurelearn website.

Futurelearn have lots of other interesting free courses, incidentally. I recently took one called Strategies for Successful Ageing from Trinity College, Dublin, which was informative and thought-provoking. I am currently half-way through a course on understanding diabetes (I was diagnosed as prediabetic earlier this year).

As well as the teaching, another big attraction of Futurelearn courses is the opportunity they provide to interact with fellow students from all over the world. There is often almost as much to learn from the other students as the course material itself!

I am also enrolled on Managing My Investments, so if you decide to sign up for the course, keep an eye out for me on the course website. I try to comment regularly and get as actively involved as I can in discussions 🙂

If you have any comments or questions about this post, please do post them below.

NOTE: This course has been postponed till 20 March 2017 from its original start date of 9 January. I have amended the post accordingly.

Save

If you enjoyed this post, please link to it on your own blog or social media: