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Accessibility statement
Qualification dates
StartEnd
03 Oct 2026Jun 2027
30 Jan 2027Sept 2027
Ready to manage your money more effectively? This innovative module will help you improve your personal finance skills – while exploring the economic, political and societal factors that influence people’s financial habits. You’ll gain practical money management skills you can use every day, from borrowing and budgeting to making smart investments and planning for your future. Alongside this, you’ll be introduced to core economic and business principles you’ll need in your career and future study. Going beyond your own finances, you’ll consider the national and global forces that influence our behaviour and relationship with money.
This module primarily aims to:
The study weeks are arranged in pairs, with each pair devoted to a different topic. In the first week of each pair, you’ll read a chapter in the module textbook. This textbook has been specially written for this module and includes lots of activities to help you reflect on the material, test your understanding and apply the ideas to your own finances. In the second week, you’ll consolidate your learning through a rich mixture of video, audio clips, slideshows, activities and interactive tools.
You can use the interactive tools to understand your own finances. For example, how tax affects your earnings, how much you’d need to save to reach a goal, what the repayments would be on a loan or mortgage, and your options for building up enough pension savings.
Here is a taste of what you’ll study in each pair of weeks:
There are no prior requirements for studying this module. You will need to use some basic mathematics (decimals, percentages, fractions, reading simple tables and charts). A few further simple numerical techniques (such as averages) are taught in subsequent weeks. The module includes a suite of interactive tools that enable you to solve financial problems without having to use or understand the maths involved.
If you have any doubt about the suitability of the module, please speak to an adviser.
You’ll get help and support from an assigned tutor throughout your module.
They’ll help by:
Online tutorials run throughout the module. While they’re not compulsory, we strongly encourage you to participate. Where possible, we’ll make recordings available.
Course work includes:
You will be provided with a textbook that is written especially for this module and accounts for 50% of the study. The rest of the study uses the module website, which includes:
You will need the use of a basic calculator.
The interactive tools run in Excel. Once the module has started and your registration is complete, you will be provided with Office 365, which includes Excel. However, you can also run the tools on your own copy of Excel if you have it.
The OU strives to make all aspects of study accessible to everyone, and this Accessibility Statement outlines what studying DB125 involves. You should use this information to inform your study preparations and any discussions with us about how we can meet your needs.
To find out more about what kind of support and adjustments might be available, contact us or visit our Disability support website.
You and your money starts twice a year – in February and October.
This page describes the module that will start in October 2026 and February 2027.
We expect it to start for the last time in February 2028.
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