Pay Day Hawaii

Still have holiday gifts to buy? Make this holiday an inspiring one: give a gift that helps provide a positive future for your loved one. Here are some clever gift ideas that will show your love and support, and help your family and friends move forward in their ambitions.

CLASSES
In this YouTube age, knowledge and instruction are just a click away. Why not give a gift of more official and useful instruction and guidance? You’ll find classes and prices at all levels. Educations and training courses can be added to a resume, or included in a job application.

Skillshare offers 18,000 classes in subjects ranging from art, design, and photography to business, technology, and writing…and more! There are both free and for-fee courses, and registration can be either free or premium (fee based).
Our favorites:

• Excel for the Real World: Gain the Basic Skills of Microsoft Excel
• Design and Bind Your Creative Portfolio
• Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and Javascript
• Hand-Coding Your First Website: HTML and CSS Basics
• How to Sell Your Art on Etsy
• Pixel Art Fundamentals: Create Pixel Art for Games
• Introduction to Plush Toy Making

Coursera offers hundreds of online classes in business, math, science, arts, computer science, and much more. Coursera offers both free and for-fee classes.
Our favorites:

• Photography Basics and Beyond
• Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides, and Delivery
• Fashion as Design
• Fundamentals of Graphic Design
• User Interface Design
• Startup Entrepreneurship

CodeAcademy is one-stop shopping for learning coding skills. Gift recipients will be able to add the right technical skills to their résumé, and pursue a more fulfilling career. There are both free and for-fee courses.
Areas of study:

• Web development
• Programming
• Data science
• Design
• Programming languages

EdX partners with universities to offer high-quality courses and programs, across all fields of interest. Both free and for-fee classes are available.
Our favorites:

• Tourism and Travel Management
• Marketing Fundamentals: Who is Your Customer?
• Robotics: Locomotion Engineering
• Solar Energy
• Eco Design for Cities and Suburbs
• HTML5: Coding Essentials and Best Practices

Lynda offers over 6,000 courses in business, technology, and creative skills, both free and for-fee.
Our favorites:

• Adobe After Effects
• Career Clinic: Developer Insights
• Illustrator CC 2015 One-on-One: Mastery
• Photoshop for Designers
• Traveling for Business
• Writing Formal Business Letters and Emails

iMark Interactive is a financial advice website that offers some useful courses to get started blogging, and building a site using WordPress.

• Understanding WordPress
• Your Guide to Blogging on WordPress

FINANCIAL AND EDUCATION APPS
This holiday season, give gifts that provide much-needed financial, business, and personal finance education. Purchase and gift a few apps that will appeal to your loved one, help them improve their finances, or get them started on that new small business.
Our favorites for personal finance management:

• Mint: Personal Finance and Money
• Banktivity
• YNAB: You Need a Budget
• Pennies: Budget and Expenses
• Debt Free: Pay Off Your Debt
• Truebill: Budget & Bill Tracker
• MoneyWiz 2: Personal Finance
• Credit Karma
• CoinKeeper
• Lending Tree Loan Calculator

For investments:

• Robinhood: Stock Trading

For saving:

• Digit
• Qapital
• Acorns: Invest Spare Change

For kids:

• Allowance & Chores Bot
• ZebraMath
• SmartKids
• JAM: Creative Courses

For small businesses:

• Square Point of Sale: Easy to set up and take credit card sales right on a smart phone.
• Zoho Expense: Expense Reports
• XpenseTracker: Expense Tracker & Mileage Log
• Invoice by Wave
• Scanner Pro
• Dropbox
• Hours Time Tracking
• Adobe Spark Post
• Notability
• Evernote
• HotspotShield VPN & Wifi Proxy
• Craftsy

Magazines and newspapers:

• Bloomberg Business Week
• Entrepreneur Magazine
• Barron’s
• The New York Times
• Tech Crunch

To learn:

• Swift Playgrounds—learn coding
• Coda
• iTunes U
• Coursera
• Lynda
• Udemy
• Udacity
• Mimo: Learn to Code on the Go
• Py: Learn to Code
• Khan Academy

We’ve just touched the surface on all the possibilities. Don’t see something that appeals?

• Take a look through the iTunes App Store (or wherever you get your apps) for many more ideas.
• Dive into the course listings at each of the education websites listed at the top of the article.
• Shop your nearest large newsstand for magazine and newspaper possibilities.

And don’t forget to get a little something for yourself! We suggest the Personal Finance for Real People widget. Personal finance topics on any computer or mobile device available 24/7. Free to read. Free to print. Free to share with your family and friends. Find it on our website: paydayhawaii.com/financial-help-topics.

Happy holidays!