As you know (if you are a current reader) I talk about my classes from time to time.  I mainly talk about the one I am really interested in: my finance class.  For some of you, this will not be too interesting at all, for the rest of you, you may learn some wisdom from the nuggets of knowledge I share.

Today I am going to talk about my finance class (big surprise there :)  ).  Today we had a guest speaker in our class - he was a financial advisor.  Actually, he would rather call himself a wealth creation artist: he takes his client’s money and creates more for them.

The topic of his presentation was not about where to invest your money.  It was not about which stock is the best.  Rather his lecture was about ways to keep more money in your pocket.  I realize this is sort of a well used topic, but he did present some innovative (and less popular) ways to get a little more bang for your buck.

He started out asking us where we kept our money - most of us said that we kept it in our bank accounts.  He urged us to compare bank accounts: what we had to what was on the market.  He challenged us to find something better than what we had - and there is a lot out there.  According to the numbers he presented to us, about 75% of people are either paying too much money or not getting enough interest on their savings.

Now that he had our attention, he moved into another hot topic: credit cards.  Being students we are slammed with a large number of offers: whether it is a pamphlet sitting on the table in a student lounge, posters on the wall, right down to emails to our school email address.  Stressing that we should be in control of our choice, his suggestion was to get the best credit card for us, not for our bank.  He highlighted some of the more popular options such as 0% interest, cash back, and reward based credit cards.

His last topic was a touchy one.  He asked the class how many of us had cars - I would say most people put their hands up.  Next he asked what we paid for car insurance.  Then he put up a power point slide that made us all gasp:  most of us were paying more than the industry average.  Sure some of the price difference was because we were students, but he told us where to look for cheap car insurance.  If we were to change insurance, most of us would walk away with at least a few hundred dollars a year - not chump change to a student.

All I can say is that I walked away enlightened today - in fact I am going to spend some time online tonight to see how much I can save for myself.