The Language of Money

The conversations I ignored

For years, I worked in an office where stock prices were everywhere.

The television in the lunchroom always seemed to be tuned to a business channel.

A ticker crawled across the bottom of the screen all day.

"Buy."

"Sell."

Company names.

Stock symbols.

Numbers changing every few seconds.

Around me, people talked about shares, dividends, earnings, and markets as casually as they talked about the weather.

I heard the conversations.

I watched the television.

I ignored all of it.

Not because I thought investing was a bad idea.

I simply assumed it wasn't relevant to me.

A language I didn't speak

The conversations sounded like another language.

"The market is bullish."

"I'm buying another ETF."

"That company just increased its dividend."

Everyone else seemed to understand.

I didn't.

So I stayed quiet.

Looking back, I wasn't avoiding investing.

I was avoiding embarrassment.

It's easier to stay silent than admit you don't understand something.

The mistake I made

For years, I thought investing wasn't for people like me.

That wasn't because of money.

It was because of vocabulary.

Every unfamiliar word convinced me there was a world I wasn't part of.

The truth was much simpler.

I just hadn't learned the language yet.

One word at a time

Eventually I started looking things up.

A bull market simply describes prices generally moving higher.

A bear market describes prices generally moving lower.

An ETF is simply a collection of investments you can buy together.

A dividend is money some companies pay to their shareholders.

The words sounded complicated.

The ideas usually weren't.

With every definition, the conversations around me became a little easier to follow.

The opportunity I couldn't see

The biggest lesson had nothing to do with bulls or bears.

It was about opportunity.

I had spent years surrounded by people talking about money.

The information wasn't hidden.

It was right in front of me every single day.

I simply didn't understand enough of the language to recognize its value.

Opportunity isn't always invisible.

Sometimes it's simply untranslated.

Learning enough

You don't need a finance degree to understand money.

You don't need to memorize hundreds of financial terms.

You only need enough knowledge to ask the next question.

Every word you learn makes the next conversation a little easier.

Eventually you stop hearing jargon.

You start hearing ideas.

The language of money

I still think about those televisions.

The ticker never stopped scrolling.

The conversations never stopped happening.

For years, I watched them without realizing they were speaking to me too.

The language of money isn't reserved for experts.

Like every language, it is learned one word at a time.