Fancy Kelsey & Finance: An Introduction
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I was working at a global NGO (that’s a fancy acronym for Non-Governmental Organization, essentially a non-profit, but international) in 2020, when operations ground to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of my colleagues had the brilliant idea of putting together a department-wide spreadsheet of everyone’s favorite books and shows to recommend to others during lockdown. I hopped on to the file, eager to share my treasures, then blinked blankly a few times, trying to rack my brain for what I would consider to be the best media I was consuming at the time. I decided to be honest:
Shows/Movies:
Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood
Pinkalicious
Robin Hood (the one with the foxes)
Books:
Pete the Cat Five Little Ducks
Cinderella
Fancy Nancy, various volumes
I think I was the only parent of young children in my division at the time, but I still really hope someone took up my recommendations. Children’s media is seriously under-rated. Take Fancy Nancy, for example. Written for young readers and listeners, Fancy Nancy relays daily adventures in the life of a whimsical little girl who loves all things pink and, well, fancy. But the brilliance packed into the pages is the lexicon of new vocabulary and definitions dribbled throughout the story, expanding young readers’ language bank without them even realizing it!
Now one field that could really use Fancy Nancy’s ability to break down “fancy” terms into easy-to-understand concepts is finance. There are so many fancy words that actually mean very simple things. Finance really need not be intimidating.
Dollar-cost averaging. Amortization. Index fund. Equity. Dividends. Basis points. Stimulus spending. Compounding. Opportunity cost. Money supply. Quantitative easing. P/E ratio. CPI. FSA. HSA. IRA. SEP-IRA. 401(k). 403(b). MMT. IMF. ETF. REIT.
Don’t those sound so fancy?!?! Just read them all out loud and you’ll probably even feel fancy. The truth is, most of them are very simple concepts indeed. As for the ones that aren’t, you can get along in life quite well, and do quite well financially, without ever knowing them (like Modern Monetary Theory… the only real reason I can think of to know that one is so you can recognize it is when you see it and understand why it really doesn’t work).
And why should you take precious time to learn any of these terms at all? Because not knowing them, or understanding what they can do for you, can cost you millions. I’m not exaggerating. There is big money at stake for letting this stuff go over your head.
Since Fancy Nancy isn’t around to do the honors of breaking down these terms, I’m stepping in to fill the gap. Stay tuned for Fancy Kelsey & Finance, a series of short blogs coming out to make finance just a little less… fancy!
