finance yahoo

finance yahoo

The Importance of Financial Education for Yahoo Users

1. Introduction

Lack of financial education has been recognized as a key problem in the achievement of household wealth and it has been addressed as an important area by several governments. In particular, the German government has initiated governmental and private sector programs on this topic for providing household and school financial education. I will also refer to a 2014 European Commission report as well as Harding and Ford (2014) for more information on school financial education, and if necessary I will refer to existing German as a general advice and support in this context since similar finance related works usually require experts with a degree in finance, or a license to interact with the financial world as governors of ECB including 20 central bank governors, and IMF, etc. Finally, this work deals with stock market data for retirement investing, but similar devices can be expected to be of interest to model other types of fiscal educations for individuals without extensive portfolios particularly, tax carting educations of dividends (Lurtz, 2015; Pasavoy, 2015; Schinco, 2015; Zilotto, 2015, 2016) as well as internationally diversifying retirement investing by the use of stocks in other countries (Dezen and Thompson, 2013).

The personal finance HedgeHog Bank neither provides detailed information nor a search engine, but can quickly generate a lot of fine-tuned financial data by practical modeling which Yahoo users are supposed to handle with institutions like brokers, banks and fund managers, are least likely get the commission-driven advice that could spoil their consulting experience and are possibly able to do a lot by themselves without such individuals. Yet I model available financial data using HedgeHog Bank and provide resulting suggestions on the subject of the retire investing and tax carting dimensions for buy-and-hold investing strategies expecting retire to continue at least five years post-work in this work.

For Yahoo users, the Yahoo.com website serves as an entry point to many sources of information over the internet. One of the topics Yahoo contains much valuable information on is financial education. It provides not only general information but also starting points to more specialized topics along with a wide range of available services on this subject.

2. The Benefits of Financial Education

While it can certainly help to reduce bad outcomes, we have to qualify that. It’s certainly the case that having had no education at all about the rules of lending leaves you blind to the fact that there may be contract terms offered by credit card lenders that lead to catastrophic circumstances for you, and that if you have no idea that credit card lenders adjust to the level of fees permitted by state regulation by changing other fees, then you could be further blindsided down the road by those changes. So certainly education can serve as a bulwark against ignorance regarding the terms that are embedded within many such credit terms.

We believe there are three categories of benefits from financial education. The first category consists of substantive benefits. Financial education can help individuals avoid mistakes that have irreversible financial consequences. The first is the effect of using high-cost debt. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that people who don’t understand the full costs of using, say, a payday loan may be more apt to use it. The second consequence of poor financial education is inadequate saving for retirement. The third potential way in which poor financial education can impose financial consequences is through inadequate planning for unexpected expenses or emergencies. The fourth category of issues that financial literacy can have an impact upon is how effectively you pay your bills and meet your financial obligations. People who have more financial knowledge use banks more effectively.

3. Yahoo’s Role in Providing Financial Education

Being able to understand finance is vital. If you can understand finance, you can understand the world. As a professional who has spent most of my career working in the financial services industry, it has always been important for me to make finance accessible to the ‘average joe’. I achieved this through my ability to translate complex financial analysis or highly complex quantitative models into language others could understand. Today, I believe that helping others become financially educated is the most important thing I can do for myself and my community. Given the power of the internet, and the fact that we are in a digital age, that age has begun to become more pervasive on the internet as a whole. According to an overwhelming number of Yahoo users, 4 out of 5 believe they would be better prepared for personal financial milestones, such as saving for retirement, paying down college loans, or purchasing a home, if they were better educated about finance. We strongly believe that using financial education can lead to a more secure future. As a result, finance improvement and investing have always been marquee elements of Yahoo Finance.

Yahoo has a strong ongoing financial education effort through its website. Yahoo’s overall mission is to connect users to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge. They want to inspire and entertain by creating highly personalized experiences that keep users connected to what matters most. This mission is supported in a number of ways through their after-school and summer programs, and an annual day of service in Maynard. Yahoo also pursues its mission through a number of community benefit initiatives. One important way in which Yahoo contributes to the community is by providing financial education to its users.

4. Strategies for Improving Financial Literacy

With regard to participants’ perceptions of the necessity for financial education, it is first observed that 96.92 percent of the participants believe that financial education is necessary. This is not surprising, given the general nature of the Yahoo User Group target audience. It is, however, heartening that the good majority of the participants affirm the need for financial literacy. It is also encouraging to see how participants believe that there is a need for the type of financial education provisions that their companies make for their clients. This is consistent with the notion of prosumerism and best practices rooted in the E3 Framework, where the instructor and the client co-create instructional value. This recognition of the need is the beginning of an active reflection where both the instructor and the client, one-on-one, can learn about each other’s perspectives and motivations.

The purpose of this paper was to assess the level of financial education of Yahoo users and motivate additional financial education among those users. For this study, a survey was distributed to self-selected individuals who were registered users of Yahoo user groups dealing in personal finance and investment. The survey focused on areas that pertained to the existence, background, value, and perception of financial education. The responses by the participants suggested that most had some knowledge about the industry, had been in the industry in some form, did indeed feel like financial education was needed by the general public, and they value the fact that financial education factors in the client’s overall big picture.

5. Conclusion

We believe that surveys, such as the European Financial Competency Framework, Findex, or the Standard & Poor’s Global Financial Literacy Study, provide valuable information about people’s familiarity with financial concepts. However, one could argue that the level of sophistication revealed by these surveys may not represent the degree of difficulty that users perceive in real life. While conventional cross-sectional household surveys based on interviews and questionnaires generalize their results from a standard, time-consistent definition of financial literacy, important changes in the real world are not properly captured. Moreover, extensive evidence documents that people may have biases in answering questions, which can further limit our understanding of the underlying concept. Overall, information coming from both conventional surveys and website searches are subject to limitations. To overcome these limitations, hours analyzing site logs have been heavily used to provide a new measure of literacy with exciting potential for researchers.

Our results indicate that people with low financial skills search for non-standard financial products. On average, Yahoo users with low financial skills view 25% fewer web pages related to standard, mainstream financial topics than people with high financial skills. Moreover, web pages focused on standard financial markets are viewed by only 4% of our sample. When people search for financial information, their clicks are mainly distributed among different financial websites. We exploit this behavior to provide insights on the distribution of user-centered difficulty in the financial landscape. Our analysis suggests that only a minority of users are interested in standard financial information and that even these users are exposed to web pages describing a broad range of financial challenges.