Penny For My Thoughts

The Nuru Personal Finance Cards I won in the contest over on MoneyNing’s blog arrived in the mail yesterday.  I’m very impressed.  While Money Ning had praised the cards’ conciseness and portability, I worried that the content would suffer due to that.  This was an unnecessary worry, as the cards manage to cover everything from the basics of the sub-prime mortgage crisis to why you should contribute to your 401k.  I was also impressed by the range of the content-I was able to follow along easily, but there’s an easy to use index within the cards (for example, if you were reading about mutual funds in your 401K, the word mutual find might have a [12] next to it to tell you that mutual funds were discussed on card 12).  The fact that the cards were up to date impressed me-they had a lot of more recent examples (like Apple’s introduction of the iPhone raising stock prices).  I think the cards are a really great idea-they aren’t as intense as a book, and easy to port around.  The cards could make a great addition to a graduation present.

It did bother me a bit that the cards seemed to push a home equity loan vs. a traditional loan-I get the tax deduction thing, but I feel like it’s a shaky suggestion in this day and age.  Also, it’s a silly point, but once you put the ring on the cards, they don’t go back in the box-I almost think a little sleeve/case would be better.