This morning I had the opportunity to give a forty-minute presentation about personal finance basics to a Penn State freshman seminar class.  One of my (many) long-term goals is to fix the lack of personal finance education at the high school and college level, so I jumped at the chance and dragged myself out of bed at 3AM to prepare a presentation.

I gave and recorded the presentation using Google Hangouts On Air:


The presentation is here and the spreadsheets referenced in the video are available here.

Unfortunately the audio on the other end wasn't working, so I was not able to do the question-and-answer session that I had planned.  In lieu of that, I'll follow up with the students using a Google Form to collect their questions and I'll post the answers here.

I have been subscribing to a lot more YouTube content lately, and I like the concept of preparing a series of short personal finance videos to add at the top of my posts here.  These videos could give the tl;dr version for people who prefer the sound of my voice to my writing style (what a choice!).

My public speaking needs work, but to be fair this was 6AM my time...

Have your taxes from previous years?  Archive them!  Collect all of your forms for each year, digitize them, and make sure they're backed up to the cloud—Google Drive, Dropbox, whatever.  The IRS can audit three to six years into the past and you can file a corrected return up to three years back, so make it a habit to keep this information organized.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger's The Tax Collector's Office, 1640.  I bet the IRS looks like this too.

If you're missing a year, or if you'd like to see what information the IRS has on your earnings for this or previous years, you can download tax account, income, and tax return transcripts online.  Just head over to the IRS transcript website and make an account!  Transcripts are free and can be downloaded immediately.  When you're doing your taxes for this year, this is an easy way to verify that you have all of the W-2s and 1099s that the IRS does.