Are you clueless when it comes to your finances? One of the most frustrating things to me is Money. $$$ Yes, that green stuff that seems to complicate everything! So for my own personal reasons I want to educate myself and try to tackle this large beast called finances. I also know that I am not the only woman that gets confused when it comes to money, so I thought I would bring some financial savviness to Savvy Sassy Moms by offering tips, websites and finance articles so together we can get a handle on this.
So to get us started on this journey Nicole Lapin from the Recessionista.com has given us the top 5 Mis-Understood finance words. We have to start somewhere ladies…
People often hear words in the finance world and because they hear them so frequently, they don’t truly understand their meaning. Below are the five most common misunderstood and misused words in finance world.
1. “Hedge”
You hear it most often when talking about hedge funds in the news. Hedging is a fancy way to say insurance. If you hedge a bet, you make sure something is there to back it up if it fails. If you are a hedge fund, you do the same thing but buying in bigger quantities at higher risk (and reward).
2. “Short”
You hear it when talking about the market, in the popular book “The Big Short.” It just means that you think something is going to fail or go down. So if you “short” a stock you think it’s going in the crapper. If you “short” America, you think it’s going to fail.
3. “Equity”
A stock is an equity. Period. It’s a fancy word to talk about stock or portion of a company you own. You are hearing it a lot in the media lately with regards to “private equity” — that’s just a way to own parts of company that isn’t available in public stock or equity exchanges.
4. “Bond”
You also hear it as “fixed income” or “paper.” It’s buying a portion of debt in turn for a percentage of profit. You can buy “paper” from the government, known as Treasury bonds, or “paper” from companies known as corporate bonds. The riskier the company or country you are buying from, the more income you will get in return. It’s fixed, unlike the profits in the stock market because you know what you are getting and it’s typically less risky that investing in public companies.
5. “AAA”
You get a credit score, so does a country. We are hearing a lot about countries losing the AAA rating. That’s a way to tell the risk of that particular country. So when you buy a “bond” that’s not AAA, which is the highest, it has more likelihood of failing. So AA+ is below AAA and then AA, AA-, A+, A, A-, then down to BBB…Greece, for example, which is bankrupt has CC. It’s a grade for anything we can invest in, just like the cleanliness grades at restaurants.
Nicole Lapin is the founder and CEO of Nothing But Gold Productions, a multimedia production company focused on creating accessible financial content across various platforms. While Nicole still is looked to by CNN, Morning Joe, ABC News Now and more for financial advice, her day job is as a financial media entrepreneur. In September, the 27-year-old left her gig as a CNBC anchor to found Nothing But Gold Productions. Her goal is to put finance news in terms and in a context that real girls will find engaging – Financial Times meets US Weekly. Nicole is the owner of website Recessionista.com, a site that’s goal is to “Remind women — rich or poor — that you don’t need to break the bank to be fabulous.”
