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Finance deals with money. So, all decisions that we make involving money are Finance decisions. As such, it is important for everyone to have a good understanding of Finance. If you want to learn Finance – both the Main Street type and the Wall Street type – you have come to the right place! Feel free to browse around the free content.
Knowledge of Finance is fast becoming an essential skill in today’s life. Every aspect of life – planning expenses for a new born baby, ensuring the availability of finances for our children’s school and college expenses, managing our day to day lives to make sure that our needs and (at least some) wants are taken care of, buying a car or a house, ensuring a secure retirement – depends crucially on our ability to make decisions that are good from a finance standpoint. A financially literate person -who knows the basics of “How Finance Works” is thus going to be better equipped to make good life decisions than someone who does not understand money.
On the business side, companies and firms of all types – from mom and pop stores to mega companies like Microsoft/Google/Apple/Amazon – rely on finance to assess the economic viability of their projects, to raise capital for new projects, to identify & manage risks, and so on. Wall Street is all finance as well! Given the significant influence of finance in much of our life, it is not surprising that the financial services industry is large. In fact, in terms of market capitalization of firms in the US, Financial Services is the second largest sector, after IT (see here). Consequently, there are good, well paying, jobs for trained finance folks!
For Main Street, many of life’s important decisions involve Finance, as one can see from the examples below.
Are you thinking of saving money? Or preparing a monthly household budget? Or thinking about how much should one save to pay for college? Yes, that is Finance.
How should you invest your money? Are the investments in your 401K or retirement plans appropriate and adequate? What asset classes/securities should you invest in? Stocks? Bonds? Mutual funds or ETFs? All of that is Finance.
Should you buy or lease a car? Is the rate the bank is offering on the car loan good? All of that is finance.
Are you buying a house and you want to take a mortgage loan? Do you want to assess the maturity or term of the mortgage (how long you want to borrow, # years), consider refinancing your mortgage, or compare loan details from different banks? That’s right, it is all finance again!
Knowledge of Finance is thus critical, whether we are part of Main Street or Wall Street! As someone who has taught finance for many decades, my intention is to make some finance content available for everyone, so they can start their path towards attaining financial literacy.
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