Hey everyone 
We’d love to hear what money related things you wish you’d learnt about sooner.
What financial buzzword or phrase have you never quite got the hang of and at this stage are too afraid to ask?
No judgment here. Just a safe space 
i wish monzo had been around 40 odd years ago , i wouldnt have got into the financial scrapes i did , now i budget a lot better thanks to monzo, not really a buzz word or phrase more a general observation
I’ll go first…
The idea of AER vs APR used to always seem daunting to me until I started working in a bank 14 years ago. They used to always get thrown about on news adverts or glossed over in TV adverts.
Plus I was young (kinda) and the idea of needing to know about this stuff didn’t seem vital.
1 Like
I hate this, personally. I see it a lot recently in relation to NFTs. Everyone is discussing it as if everyone already understands and knows what they are, and honestly I’m not sure the people talking about them do either, because I ask every time someone talks about them, and I get some variance of answer that doesn’t actually tell me anything! To this day, I still don’t understand NFTs and probably won’t until I go out of my way to research them myself. They get thrown around with crypto currency a lot, so I presume them to be a financial buzzword that I’d love to properly know the meaning of and understand the concept beyond what the acronym stands for!
Another pet peeve of mine is when experts would rather dismiss buzzwords as things you don’t really need to understand when putting things into layman’s terms instead of just ELI5 them.
1 Like
When I was younger I did not realise that Banks saying “We are making it simpler” equates to “we are making it more expensive” 
1 Like
Tax, mortgages and credit files should be drilled into us at school, not playing the triangle or running with an egg on a spoon in a potato sack 
3 Likes
Literally had no clue about this when I was at school. The repercussions of not being on top of it etc.
Now that I’m on the hunt for a house that situation has changed greatly 
1 Like
I’ve legit had to do quite a bit of research into this as when the term kept on getting used I just saw it as a punchline to a joke but the way everyone has jumped on to them it kinda demanded I open up to not knowing what it meant.
Any other financial acronyms you can’t stand?
1 Like
I’m by no means new to investing, but I still find a lot of the buzzwords thrown around in relation to investing a bit alien to me! And I’m not just talking about to the moon! I find it difficult to grasp and remember whether something is a fund or trust, whether the T in a lot of the acronyms stands for trust, tracker, or traded!
Even the more accessible and consumer friendly investment platforms still aren’t very layman friendly. Those are a good example of situations where rather than make stuff easy to understand, or to educate, they take the approach of just ignore it, don’t worry about it, just give us your money and it’ll grow, to the point where stowing your money away in a stocks and shares ISA is barely discernible from putting it into a savings account!
It took me a lot longer than I’d like to admit to know the difference between gross and net.
2 Likes
Shiraz
I’d have saved a fortune if I never heard that word.
EDIT: To be fair, I’ve used the word before…
4 Likes
That’s interesting. Considering they’re mandatory terms, you’d think there was better education regarding them so people really understood.
That way maybe a lot of the forum wouldn’t have hailed the exorbitantly expensive way you used to charge for overdrafts as a good deal with APR’s in the 100s
1 Like
What financial buzzword or phrase have you never quite got the hang of and at this stage are too afraid to ask?
‘Credit’ and ‘debit’, which is embarrassing since I work alongside accountants…
2 Likes
Depreciation and amortisation were the ones that always got me, more specifically when it is amortisation instead of depreciation (I know it’s about the reduction in value of an intangible asset, but I always found the descriptions online a bit fluffy. I guess it is the nature of the intangible asset which is really the fluffy bit).
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.