New Features

McGraw-Hill’s Connect Finance. Connect Finance offers a number of powerful tools and features to make managing assignments easier, so you can spend more time teaching. Students can engage with their coursework anytime and anywhere, making the learning process more accessible and efficient. In short, Connect Finance facilitates student learning and optimizes your time and energies, enabling you to focus on course content, teaching, and student learning.

• Create and deliver online, auto-graded homework assignments, quizzes, and tests directly from the end-of-chapter materials or test bank. Problems are available as both static and algorithmic problems, and there are also multiple-choice conceptual questions.
• Students receive immediate, detailed feedback on their assignments, allowing them to focus on the areas where they need improvement.
• Questions mapped to AACSB skill areas, Bloom’s Taxonomy levels, and difficulty level enable you to run reports that assess specific learning outcomes.
• LearnSmart ensures your students are learning faster, studying more efficiently, and retaining more knowledge. It pinpoints concepts the student does not understand and maps out a personalized study plan for success. Based on students’ self-diagnoses of their proficiency, LearnSmart intelligently provides students with a series of adaptive questions. This provides students with a personalized one-on-one tutor experience.
• Interactive Applications stimulate critical thinking and reinforce key concepts, and students receive immediate feedback and can track their progress in their own report. Students will be asked to “click and drag” specific choices to make decisions, categorize, or put in a time sequence, and then are asked multiple-choice questions to confirm understanding of the key concepts of the activity.
• A Self Quiz and Study program allows students to evaluate their performance through a practice test and then receive recommendations for specific readings from the text, supplemental study material, and practice work that will improve their mastery of each learning objective.
• Pre-built assignments are available to save you set up time.

Connect Plus Finance. This packaging option combines all the great features of Connect Finance, along with access to an online version of Personal Finance, linked to additional study features, so that students can easily refer back to the text for review and guidance. Connect Plus Finance is available with a new book at no additional charge!

In response to the economic crisis, the authors address the real and changing financial needs and dilemmas of students. For example, the book guides students through career planning and discusses the importance of identifying their own strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats within their chosen field. In a time when finding a job is especially challenging, the book also suggests actions for improving employability in tough economic times. In addition, Personal Finance, 10e addresses getting and staying out of debt; financing college education; managing a future financial crisis; and investing in conservative securities to minimize losses during economic downturns.

Every chapter has been revised and updated with information most relevant to today’s students. New material includes coverage of:

• Financial planning, housing, and banking phone applications
• Social entrepreneurship as a career option
• Cross-cultural financial services
• Rent-to-buy options
• New legislation including the Credit Card Act of 2009, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010

The Tenth Edition builds on an already unmatched pedagogical program with the following new features:

• How To boxes in every chapter walk students step by step through specific personal finance activities such as filing taxes online or opening a brokerage account.
• New “My Life Stages” boxes at the end of each chapter recommend to students the financial preparations they should consider at different stages in their life. This addresses the needs of changing demographics within the personal finance course area since it now includes many returning and part time students.

RETAINED FEATURES:

• Chapter openers include the My Life feature which actively involves the student in the chapter material by relating it to their own lives and explaining not only what they’ll learn in the chapter, but also why it’s important. Includes follow-up questions to motivate students to improve their approach to personal finance.
• The Daily Spending Diary is included in Appendix C for students to record their day to day expenses in different categories, helping them monitor their everyday spending to maintain better control over their finances as daily spending can have a huge impact on achieving financial goals. The end of each chapter includes a Daily Spending Diary exercise that asks students to consider how they can change their daily spending habits to improve their personal finances overall.
• The authors present personal financial planning for a variety of life situations so that the text is a practical resource throughout one’s lifespan. It addresses the financial needs of a single parent, two-income, mixed-generation, and other types of households throughout the text. The different financial pressures and considerations that come into play in these situations are illustrated in text examples, the Financial Planning for Life's Situations boxes, the new “My Life Stages” boxes, and in the end-of-chapter Financial Planning Cases and in the Continuing Cases.
• Personal Finance teaches quantitative analysis in financial planning by presenting more than 90 commonly used key formulas (summarized at the end of each chapter) and mathematical functions in text discussion and examples. This information is further highlighted in the Financial Planning Calculations boxes, which provide additional examples and information for students.
• Personal Financial Planner (PFP) sheets correlate with the sections of the text and are conveniently located at the end of the text! The PFP sheets are written by the authors to help students create and implement a personal financial plan. These perforated sheets ask students to work through the application and record their own personal financial plan answers; thus, applying answers to their own personal situations and providing a roadmap to their personal financial future. Excel versions of these sheets are available on the website at www.mhhe.com/kdh.
• Every chapter includes a Video Case. The instructor can show the video segment in class (each segment is about 5-10 minutes long – perfect for discussion launchers!) and then use the Video Case questions at the end of the chapters for class discussion. These cases are another way to help students analyze financial situations.
• “Did You Know?” boxes contain the latest facts, information and financial planning assistance available. These are short but useful boxes that have proven popular among faculty and students alike.