Self-paced online courses
Two courses. No filler.
Both courses below are self-paced, available whenever you have twenty minutes, and built entirely around explaining mechanics rather than pushing a product. Here's exactly what's covered in each one.
Where did my paycheck go?
This is the programme most people start with. It follows a single dollar from your gross pay all the way to the number that lands in your checking account, explaining every stop it makes along the way.
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01
Gross pay vs. net pay
What the offer letter didn't mention, and why "salary" and "take-home pay" are two very different numbers.
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02
Federal withholding
How the IRS collects its share before the money ever reaches you, and what a W-4 actually controls.
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03
FICA, Social Security, and Medicare
The deductions you can't opt out of, and where that percentage actually goes.
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04
State and local taxes
Why the same salary looks different on a pay stub depending on which state, or even which city, you work in.
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05
Benefits deductions
Health insurance premiums, HSA and FSA contributions, and how to read the fine print without a glossary.
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06
Retirement contributions
Reading the 401(k) line on your pay stub without panicking, and understanding what "match" actually means.
Why you bought that (and how to notice it happening)
This course looks at the psychology behind impulse spending, drawing directly from published behavioral economics research. It's not about willpower. It's about recognizing the specific moments where a decision gets made before you've really thought about it.
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01
What "impulse" actually means
A working definition drawn from behavioral economics, separating impulse spending from ordinary spontaneous purchases.
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02
Present bias
Why later-you keeps getting stuck with the bill that now-you didn't think twice about.
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03
Emotional triggers
Stress, boredom, celebration, and social comparison, and how each one shows up differently in spending patterns.
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04
The pause technique
A simple friction-based method for creating space between the urge and the purchase.
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05
Recognizing manufactured urgency
How countdown timers, low-stock alerts, and limited-time framing are designed to short-circuit the pause.
VMware vSphere & vCenter administration
Our newest self-paced track applies the same step-by-step teaching style to virtualization. It's built for IT professionals who administer a VMware environment and want to understand vSphere and vCenter properly, plus report on the estate cleanly using RVTools.
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01
What vSphere actually is
ESXi hosts, the hypervisor layer, and how the pieces of a VMware environment fit together before you touch a single setting.
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02
Getting around vCenter
The vCenter Server interface, inventory hierarchy, and the daily views an administrator relies on to manage hosts and virtual machines.
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03
Storage and networking basics
Datastores, virtual switches, and port groups explained in plain language, so vSphere networking stops being intimidating.
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04
Clusters, HA, and vMotion
How vCenter keeps workloads running: resource pools, high availability, and moving a live VM between hosts without downtime.
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05
Reporting with RVTools
Using RVTools, the utility from Robware now maintained by Dell, to export a full vSphere inventory and read it: orphaned VMs, snapshots, and misconfigurations.
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06
Turning reports into decisions
Taking raw vCenter and RVTools data and translating it into cleanup, capacity, and housekeeping decisions you can defend to a team.
Looking for something live?
The budget workshop and the ad-literacy masterclass run separately
Those two are session-based rather than self-paced, so we cover them on their own page with the current session structure.
Still deciding where to start?
Send us a note describing what you're trying to understand and we'll point you to the right module.
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