The world has known about free online courses like MIT OpenCourseWare and Open University (for a longer list, check the end of my foundation post about online education). Until today, I wasn’t aware of any university that has offered personal finance courses and certainly not one that has put it all on the web for anyone to use!

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I recently had the opportunity to write a preface to Robert Pagliarini’s ebook on surviving the 2009 financial crisis, titled Plan Z: How to Survive the 2009 Financial Crisis. My preface covered a topic I’m sure regular readers of Bargaineering recognize, Your Financial Network Map, but the rest of the 80-page e-book should be new material for you.

Robert Pagliarini is a certified financial planner that wrote the Six-Day Financial Makeover and is a regular magazine contributor to Affluent magazine. In Plan Z, Robert writes about what you should do right now to help navigate the financial crisis and economic recession we are currently in.

If you’re concerned about how tenuous your finances are and you aren’t sure what you should be doing, I recommend that you read Plan Z. It’s an absolutely free ebook that doesn’t try to sell you on Robert’s services (though he does offer up his credentials to prove you should listen to what he has to say), so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give it a look.

A few years ago, Trent of The Simple Dollar wrote a post in which he boiled down all the salient points of personal finance onto five business cards. Well this week he converted those five business cards to a page and then fleshed it out with an 49-page eBook behind it… all of which are absolutely free.

The book focuses on five core ideas: Spend less than you earn, earn more, live frugal, manage your money, and control your own destiny. Then, through a mix of original content and posts previously published on his site, Trent gives you concrete applicable ideas with those core ideas in mind. The largest section is the frugality section, where he lists 100 tips previously seen on his site.

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I just learned that it’s National Consumer Protection Week and the featured resource is the very book I mention below, the Consumer Action Handbook!

Did you know that the U.S. General Services Administration’s Federal Citizen Information Center offers hundreds of publications that you, as a consumer, could benefit from? Each year, they send out a catalog of their pamphlets and booklets and I received mine last week. I now receive it because I once ordered a copy of their Consumer Action Handbook, yet another entirely free publication. I never order anything because all the documents are available online (and if it’s available online, why waste the paper printing it out and the fuel on shipping it to me?).

Let’s take a look at some of the publications in their “Cars” category:
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We’re deep in the throes of tax season and with the economy in the sorry shape that it’s in, I’m sure many taxpayers are looking to gain an edge. I mean we’re already paying taxes, surely it makes less sense that we have to pay to figure out how much we’re going to pay in taxes right? Fortunately, there are a lot of different ways you can get tax filing software or assistance absolutely free.

In addition to the nationally available programs I’m about the list, there are also a lot of local programs. Each state’s tax website will usually list the free tax filing resources or services available in the state. many of these are simply listings of data made available through the IRS Free File system but you might be able to find some gems in there as well.

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I just received an email from Zecco about a change to their fee structure, effective 01 Jan 2008, and below is a comparison of the changes as I can tell.

*Minimum Balance: Under the new structure, you only get 10 free trades a month if you have a balance over $2,500. Those with balances under $2,500 will not get any free trades. So, while the account has no minimum balance, to qualify for ten free trades you must have more than $2,500 in that account.

Summary

This likely will have little effect on the majority of Zecco users as Zecco claims that 98% of their investors will not be affected, that is, 98% trade less than 10 times a month (good!). I bet you that they saw a large percentage of their costs being eaten up by day traders and so they decided to change the structure such that they can start charging those “power users” without upsetting the majority of their customers. This also allows them to add a number of features they’ve wanted to such as increasing the number of service representatives, adding 3 and 4 legged options strategies (butterflies, condors, etc.), releasing options analytics, and building up their ZeccoShare social network (all these were described in the email).