Applied Behavioral Finance

Audience: Business, financial planning and financial therapy professionals
Method: Online course
Duration: 8 weeks
Graduate application: Not required
Credits: 3
Cost: $2,900

This fall course will open for registration in spring 2020. Enter your contact information, and we’ll let you know when the course is available.

Discover the key to behavioral finance

This applied behavioral finance course examines the intersection of behavioral finance, financial psychology, and financial planning theory, practice, and research. It reviews the research on behavioral finance and investor psychology, exploring the effects of human emotions and cognitive errors on financial decisions. This course focuses on the application of behavioral finance theory and research to the practice of business, financial planning and financial therapy to help professionals improve the financial health of their clients.

Objectives for this online professional development course

This course aims to:

• Provide an environment conducive to the study of behavioral finance using written and oral presentations and applied financial psychology theory and techniques
• Strengthen participants’ ability to understand financial psychology and its implications with regard to financial health of clients and clients’ ability to reach their financial goals
• Apply theory and technique to gain a deeper understanding of the student’s own personal financial psychology
• Help identify cognitive and emotional biases that impact investor behaviors
• Describe methods for helping clients identify, challenge, and change cognitive and emotional biases
• Help students learn to apply research findings in behavioral finance to real-world situations with clients

Behavioral finance course outline

This eight-week course will cover a variety of topics:

• Week 1: Intro to applied behavioral finance
• Week 2: Cognitive dissonance, conservatism, confirmation and representativeness 
• Week 3: Illusion of control, hindsight, mental accounting, and anchoring and adjustment 
• Week 4: Framing, availability, self-attribution and outcome
• Week 5: Recency, loss aversion, overconfidence and self-control
• Week 6: Status quo, endowment, regret aversion and affinity
• Week 7: Financial therapy for cognitive biases
• Week 8: Applied behavioral finance project

COURSE CREDIT

This is one of five courses in the Certificate in Financial Psychology and Behavioral Finance, and it’s worth 3 credits. The course can be taken independently as a professional development course or as part of the certificate program. Please note that students are limited to earning a maximum of nine graduate credits before applying for admission into a degree or certificate program. If you are below the nine-credit limit and are not seeking a certificate or degree, you’re free to take this course without applying to the graduate school.

Creighton University will issue a 1098-T by January 31 for all learners enrolled in courses for credit. As part of that process, you may be asked to provide your Social Security number.

Meet your course instructor

Applied Behavioral Finance is taught by Bradley Klontz, PsyD, CFP®. An associate professor in the Heider College of Business, Klontz is a founder of the Financial Psychology Institute, a managing principal of Your Mental Wealth Advisors, a fellow of the American Psychological Association and a former president of the Hawaii Psychological Association.

Dr. Klontz was awarded the Innovative Practice Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association for his application of psychological interventions to help people with money and wealth issues and his innovative practice in financial psychology for practitioners across the country.

Dr. Klontz has co-authored/co-edited five books on financial psychology, and his work has been featured on ABC News’ 20/20 and Good Morning America and in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, Kiplinger’s, Money Magazine, NPR and many other media outlets, professional magazines and journals.

Required materials

• Pompian, M. (2012). Behavioral finance and wealth management: How to build optimal portfolios that account for investor biases, 2nd edition. Wiley Finance.

• Klontz, B., Kahler, R., Klontz, T. (2016). Facilitating financial health: Tools for planners, coaches, and therapists, 2nd edition. Cincinnati, OH: The National Underwriter Company.

Refund Policy