You have $500 and six months. Here's where it goes.

Five hundred dollars buys a recognized finance credential, or a year of data training, or a certification exam with $401 left over. Which one is right depends on a question almost nobody asks first: are you buying the teaching, or are you buying the line on your resume? They are not the same purchase, and only one of them is expensive.

Compare the platforms yourself →

Or read on for the three allocations ↓

This is the question I get more than any other, and I've never answered it properly because the honest answer isn't a product — it's a budget. So this week: $500, six months, and at the end you need something you can show someone. I re-checked every price on this page in a browser before sending this, because two of them had moved since I last wrote them down.

1. The finance one — $347.90, and don't spend the rest

CFI's Self-Study plan lists at $497 a year. Nobody pays that. Walk onto the pricing page cold and a 20% code is already applied for you, so the number you actually see is $397.60. With the AFF30 code it's $347.90.

Two things I want to be straight about, because plenty of sites aren't. AFF30 is not our code — it's on the whole partner list, and anyone can use it. And it does not save you $149. It saves you $49.70 against the price you'd have been shown anyway. The gap between $497 and $397.60 is theatre; the gap between $397.60 and $347.90 is real money. A lot of write-ups quote the first number and let you assume the second.

For that you get seven accredited certification exams, FMVA among them, which is the one hiring managers in corporate finance actually recognize. That leaves $152.10 of your budget. My advice is to leave it there. The most common way people waste this budget is topping up a working plan with a second subscription they never open.

2. The data one — $231 apart today, $63 apart when the sale ends

This is where the "teaching or resume line" question bites hardest, because the two obvious options look similar and aren't.

Coursera Plus is $399 a year and the reason to buy it is the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate — a name a recruiter recognizes without you explaining it. DataCamp Premium is $168 ($14 a month billed annually, 790+ courses) — but that is a promotional "Special Price" running to 24 September, and it renews at $28 a month, $336 a year. Budget for the renewal, not the intro. The reason to buy it is that it drills you until SQL and pandas are muscle memory. One buys recognition. The other buys competence. If you already have the job, buy the second. If you're trying to get it, buy the first.

One live wrinkle worth knowing before you commit. Coursera is currently showing $35 a month instead of $59, with the offer marked as ending 23 September, and it renews at $59. On a six-month plan that beats the $399 annual, and the terms are specific: $35 for three consecutive months, then $59. So six months costs $282 against $399 for the annual — on this budget, over this exact timeline, monthly wins by $117. That only holds while the September offer runs. It is worth more than most of the advice written about which platform to choose.

3. The one that spends $0 on courses

If you want into cloud, the entire allocation is $99 — the AZ-900 exam fee. Not $99 plus a course. Just $99.

Microsoft publishes the preparation for its own exam, free, on the certification page itself — the Cloud Infrastructure learning paths and a free practice assessment. It is written by the people who write the exam. There is no third-party course that knows the objectives better, and I checked that AZ-900 carries no retirement date, which after this year is not a given. Three Azure certifications retired earlier in 2026, and a fourth — Azure Security Engineer Associate — retired on 31 August.

So the honest allocation is $99 spent and $401 unspent, and I think it's the strongest of the three. The mistake it avoids is the most expensive one in this whole category: paying $300 for a course to prepare you for a $99 exam whose official preparation was free. If you want the tier above it, AZ-104 is where cloud salaries actually move — but AZ-900 first, and only if the free prep leaves you wanting more.

The price of the course and the price of the credential are two different numbers. Only one of them ends up on your resume, and it's usually the smaller one. Work out which you're buying before you spend anything — and if you reply and tell me what you're deciding between, I'll answer a few of them in a future issue.