“Double your money in five years”
“Eliminate your credit card debt”
“Obtain your dream job”
“Travel to a different country each year”
“Cut your automobile insurance rates by one-third”

This book cannot promise you any of these. However, we CAN promise you the opportunity, along with your efforts, to achieve these and many other personal financial goals.

While technology, the global economy, and other social trends are changing the financial planning environment, many fundamentals remain constant. Your ability to make informed choices related to spending, saving, borrowing, and investing continues to be the foundation of long-term financial security.

A Framework for Decision Making

Each day we are surrounded with new choices for shopping, television channels, and other activities. Money choices can be intense; however, Personal Finance, Eighth Edition, offers many tools to cope with these situations. The steps of the financial planning decision making process are introduced in Chapter 1. This step-by-step approach will help you identify and evaluate choices as well as understand the consequences of your decisions in terms of opportunity costs.

New Content and Features to This Edition

With a continued emphasis on technology, real-world decision making, and practical advice from financial planning professionals, this edition of Personal Finance provides you with a strong foundation for your current and future personal economic activities. In addition, many topics and instructional features have been added or enhanced to better serve both students and instructors.

Each day, personal financial planning activities are affected by changing influences in our society and the economy. As a result, we attempt to continually update our material so you are well prepared for facing all financial situations. Just to get an idea of the expanded coverage in this eighth edition of Personal Finance, the table that follows highlights some of our additions. These improvements are in addition to revised and updated foundation material provided for understanding personal finance.