Finance Brain is live: personal finance courses on the Braineos platform

A while ago we wrote about Braineos becoming a platform: one codebase that can run several focused learning sites, each with its own name, content and database. At the time, the first of those sites was just a draft profile with placeholder artwork and no domain.

It's live now. Finance Brain is a free financial literacy site, and it's the first partner site running on Braineos.

What Finance Brain is

Finance Brain teaches personal finance, investing and economics through structured courses. You don't build your own decks there. Instead you work through courses that have already been written, one lesson at a time.

There are 28 courses at launch, grouped into eight subjects:

Money Management: Personal Finance.
Investing: Investment Classes, Real Estate, Commodities, Equities, Bonds and Crypto.
Portfolio Management: Portfolio Foundations, Modern Portfolio Theory, Strategic Asset Allocation, Factor Investing and Portfolio Psychology.
US Taxation: from the Architecture of US Taxation through Deductions, Credits and Filing, Capital Gains, Retirement Accounts and Tax Planning Strategies.
Economics: Foundations of Economics, Behavioral Economics and Macroeconomics.
Psychology: The Importance of Psychology and Cognitive Biases.
Money & Conflict: a history strand, from Ancient Monetary Wars and the British Financial Revolution to the World Wars and Modern Economic Warfare.
Business: Entrepreneurship.

A course is split into units, and each unit into short lessons. The Personal Finance course, for example, has four units (Essential Personal Finance, Budgeting, Debt and Retirement Planning) with three lessons each. You read a lesson, answer multiple-choice questions on it, and then the questions come back for review on a spaced-repetition schedule, so you're tested again right before you'd likely forget.

Everything on Finance Brain is educational. It isn't financial, investment, tax or legal advice, and the site says so on every course.

Same engine, different site

If you use Braineos.com, a lot of Finance Brain will feel familiar, because it's the same code underneath:

The scheduler that decides when a card comes back is the one Braineos uses.
Lessons and multiple-choice cards, the two building blocks Finance Brain is made of, were built into Braineos first. They're available on Braineos.com decks too.
Streaks and progress tracking work the same way.

What's different is the configuration. Finance Brain has its own name, logo, colours and copy, and a set of feature switches that suit a course site. It turns courses on and user-made decks off, and leaves out things like player-vs-player challenges. It also has its own separate database, so nothing you do on one site shows up on the other, and your Braineos account isn't a Finance Brain account (or the other way round).

Building it this way means work done for one site isn't stuck there: a feature or fix made for one site is available to the other as soon as it's switched on.

It's on Android too

Finance Brain is also on Google Play. Sign in with the same Google account you use on the website and your course progress carries over. The Android app is built from the same React Native code as the Braineos app, with its own store listing. Koshka Solutions has written up how that works: Finance Brain is on Google Play: one React Native app, two store listings.

What this means for Braineos

Nothing changes about Braineos.com. Your decks, reviews and streak stay exactly where they are, and Braineos stays the place for building and sharing your own flashcards. Finance Brain is for people who'd rather follow a course someone else has planned out.

If money is a subject you've meant to get round to, try a course on Finance Brain. It's free to sign up.