Capstone: First Year on Your Own
The Go Further companion to the Capstone in Money Decisions.
CFPB — Consumer Tools
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's full toolkit for your first year out of school: guides and tools for bank accounts, credit cards, auto loans, debt and more — the same bureau whose guides sit behind half this book's QR codes, in one place.
Key ideas from the lesson
- The Capstone runs one whole first year — Marisol's — through seven checkpoints, and every number has to trace back to something you learned this semester.
- The paycheck and tax time (Unit 2): read the stub, fill the FICA lines, and settle up at filing — the same path as Lessons 2.3, 2.6 and 2.7.
- The budget (Unit 1): a zero-based plan where the fixed bills come first, the emergency fund gets its line, and a mid-month repair has to come out of somewhere named.
- The card and the crash (Units 3–4): choose between two real card offers on total cost, then work a crash on New York minimum coverage — who pays first, and what lands on you.
- The plot twists and the long game (Units 4–5): spot the 2 a.m. “bank security” text for what it is, dispute a charge inside its deadline — and automate $150 a month to watch compounding do to Marisol's money what Lesson 5.1 said it would do to yours.
Why this helps
Every other Go Further page in this book hands you one tool for one lesson. The Capstone is the whole course at once, so its page is the whole toolbox: the CFPB's consumer tools hub, where the guides behind this book's credit, debt and complaint lessons live side by side — worth bookmarking for the real first year, not just Marisol's.
Try this
Pick the checkpoint that cost Marisol the most when it went wrong — or would have. Find the CFPB tool that matches it and write down the first action it recommends. That pairing — checkpoint to tool — is your own first-year playbook in one line.
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