Financial jargon is mostly ordinary ideas wearing a suit. Once you know what interest is, an APR is not frightening. Once you understand needs versus wants, budgeting is not a mystery. Start here.
In this section
Needs and wants
The distinction that quietly decides where most people's money goes — and why it is much blurrier than the school version suggests.
Saving and goals
Why saving for nothing in particular almost never works, and what to do instead.
What is interest?
Rent for money. It grows your savings and it makes borrowing expensive — same idea, two directions.
What is a loan?
How borrowing actually works, why you always pay back more, and how to spot the loans designed to catch people out.
Where money lives
Banks, accounts and cards. What happens to your money when you cannot see it, and what the different bits of plastic actually do.
How these fit together
Read in order, they tell one story. You have some money. You have to decide what it is for (needs and wants). Some of it you keep for later (saving). While it waits, it can grow, because money has a price (interest). That same price is what you pay when you use somebody else's money instead of your own (loans). And all of this happens somewhere other than your pocket (banks and accounts).
One idea to carry through all of it
Money is stored choices. When you earn it, you are converting time and effort into choices you can make later. When you spend it, you are cashing a choice in. When you save it, you are keeping your options open. When you borrow, you are spending choices you have not earned yet — which is why it costs extra.
Money words, translated
Most financial vocabulary is an ordinary idea in a suit. Here are the ones that come up most often, in the words people would use if they were not trying to sound official.
| The word | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| Income | Money coming in. |
| Expenditure | Money going out. |
| Budget | A plan for the money before you spend it, rather than a guess afterwards. |
| Balance | What is left. |
| Credit | Borrowed money. On a bank statement, confusingly, it can also mean money paid in. |
| Debt | Money you owe. |
| Interest | The price of using money that is not yours — see what is interest. |
| Inflation | Prices generally going up, which means the same money buys less than it did. |
| Deposit | Money put in — either into an account, or paid upfront to hold something. |
| Instalment | One of several payments spreading a cost over time. |
Why we start with these five
Adult money problems are rarely caused by not understanding something complicated. They are caused by ordinary things compounding quietly: a want that got treated as a need, a saving goal that was never specific enough to finish, a debt whose total was never checked against its monthly payment.
Every page in this section is aimed at one of those. None of it requires maths beyond percentages, and none of it needs to wait until someone is older.