Five Articles to Refresh Your Financial Literacy
June 15, 2021
Encompassing a broad range of money topics — from balancing a checkbook to developing a household budget and planning for retirement — financial literacy shapes the way we view and handle money.
To help you get started, this Investopedia article focuses on five financial improvements, suggesting some of Investopedia's best articles to jump-start your journey to financial literacy.
- Identify your starting point — If you don’t know where you are financially, it can be challenging to plan how to get to where you want to be next year, five years from now, or decades down the road in retirement.
- Set your priorities — Creating a list of needs and wants can help you set financial priorities.
- Document your spending — Most people could tell you how much money they make in a year. Fewer could state how much money they spend, and fewer still could explain how and where they spend it.
- Pay down your debt — As a rule, debt is not good, and what makes living with debt so costly is not just the interest and fees; it’s also the fact that it can prevent people from ever getting ahead with their financial goals.
- Secure your financial future — You can’t always control when you retire. You could lose the job that you’ve held for decades, suffer an illness or injury, or find you need to care for a loved one—any of which could lead to an unplanned retirement.
Stout Bowman regularly posts important and interesting information on our blog. Current topics include credit/debit/loans, estate planning, insurance, investing, Medicare, retirement, Social Security and taxes, as well as general information that we think you might find of interest. 
We have been publishing an email newsletter for our clients and friends since 2016. Links to all of the newsletters can be found on our newsletter page, with the most recent listed first. We try to keep our emails short, so there are typically only three articles in each one, most of which link to other articles in the financial and mainstream press. 
We also have a page on our site for the latest news about our company, notice of any upcoming events, and a market commentary to discuss what our advisors and other financial industry experts conclude about the previous investment performance and what we might expect the markets and the economy will do in the coming months. 
Many news organizations offer what is called a Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed, a listing of the latest changes to their site's content. We have subscribed to several of these news feeds and present a list of their latest ten articles on a page on this website to save our clients the hassle of going to multiple websites just to see what is available. Currently, we subscribe to 
At Stout Bowman every investment client is first a financial planning client; it's important to go through that process before we make any professional investment recommendations. Therefore, we strive to make financial planning understandable and comfortable every step of the way. One way to do that is to provide our clients access to financial education resources. To that end, we have subscribed to educational websites to receive their news feeds and present a list of their latest ten articles on a page on this website. Currently, we offer