Nuru is a company based out of Salt Lake City, Utah with a mission to “provide portable, performance-enhancing knowledge to the masses.” Its latest product is the Nuru Knowledge for Real Life Personal Finance Cards. As the name implies, the Nuru personal finance cards are a set of 28 double-sided cards dealing with all things personal finance. As an educational tool, Nuru succeeds in imparting to its audience the ins and outs of personal finance.

The deck of cards (and they are the same size as playing cards) are divided into 7 categories: essential vocabulary, personal planning, investing, loans, retirement vehicles, credit and insurance.  The content in the cards vary from informational, to advice-based to consumer advisory to plain-old personal finance common sense. The cards are written from the point of view of a do it yourself investor. For example, consider this passage from the  “term vs. whole life insurance” card:

“Remember, if an insurance agent tells you to invest in cash-value insurance simply because it offers tax-deferred savings, remember you can probably get the same benefit out of a Roth IRA or 401K without paying sales commission to the insurance agent.”

… you know this was written from the viewpoint of the everyday investor if it is telling you how to eliminate commissions!

There are cross-referencing footnotes in the cards. Since the package comes with a ring, it is easy to keep the set together and flip back and forth.

The Nuru Personal Finance Cards succeed in providing concise, easy to understand information about personal finance without being hestiatant about giving some advice. It is ideal for someone who wants to get their personal finance house in order and needs an easy to understand guide to make some intelligent decisions.

I do have two suggestions. They need to color-code their sections for easier reference (all the cards have green headers) and they should add at least 2-5 more cards to the deck for further coverage; a section about debt consolidation or debt related issues would be timely and topical.

There are minor suggestions but, overall, it is a very helpful resource on personal finances and highly reccommend.

FREE STUFF! The good people of Nuru have given me a complementary pack of the Personal Finance cards to give away to my readers. Simply leave a comment to be eligible. Draw closes on Friday at 8:00 p.m. EST (to be fair to the readers on the west coast). Good luck.