The creation of a personal financial plan and doing your own personal financial planning is very difficult. We cover your mortgage, financial planning, taxes and tax planning, investing in stocks, bonds and mutual funds, investment planning, insurance planning. If your personal financial plan includes stocks, bonds or mutual funds, you need to understand all of these if you are doing sound investment planning and retirement planning. You may not want to do your own personal financial plan or your own retirement planning, but the more information you know, the better off your financial plan will be. We've got free software and finance links to a lot of mutual fund companies as well as financial links to information that is critical to your finance planning needs.

FDIC Changes for 2009.
The FDIC has some new insurance coverage rules for 2009 ONLY!

Investing Today.
With todays volitile and slammed stock market, how should we all be investing today?

ETF Basics.
Basic information about how ETFs work and the differences between them and mutual funds.

ETF Tracking Error.
Not all funds directly track their benchmark, understand why here.

Retirement Needs Calculator.
Determine how much you will need to save in order to retire with the life style that you desire. This is the first section of the retirement planning tool that is coming.

Full Retirement Planning Calculator.
The web version of the Personal Retirement Planner is finally here. This is the full version of the FinPlan Retirement Planning software currently available for download. [Note: we will be discontinuing the download soon.]

Retirement Savings Calculator.
Determine how much your retirement savings will be worth, the day you retire. Use this tool along with the Needs calculator to determine if you're on the right track.

Economic Indicators. A primer on several key economic indicators and what they tell you about the economy and how they can affect your personal finance and your personal financial planing.

Your investment plan. This article explains the six steps in developing your personal investment plan, one of the foundations of financial planning.

Investing in Mutual Funds. Covers several key topics if you invest in mutual funds, this is a core topic of personal financial planning for many people.

Buying a home. This feature covers several topics related to getting a mortgage, owning a home, how to compare mortgage rates and a mortgage loan amortization schedule [including the affects on your income taxes].

Insurance. The insurance planning page has a few basic articles on life insurance and insurance planning, the types of insurance and the first round of a life insurance needs calculation tool.

Traditional IRAs
Effective January 1, 2002 there have been a few changes to the Traditional IRA. Lowering your taxes is important to your investment planning. Some of these changes to the laws and how they will affect your taxes are explained here.

Investing in stocks or bonds? Personal financial planning tools at our free software and tool menu has a couple of tools related to investing in both stocks and bonds as well as other tools important to your taxes and to your personal financial planning.

Estate planning. One of the first steps in putting together an estate plan is to create your will. Visit our estate plan section.