If you were an architect or a doctor, you would know the nomenclature of architecture or medicine. If you are not a doctor, you would pick up some of the terminologies of medicine from your family doctor, the media or friends, however, you wouldn’t have a full command of it unless you were very interested and committed to years of study. Even within the field of medicine, there are specialties that have their own terminologies. Yikes!

Every specialized field has its own set of nomenclature and with the number of fields and specialties expanding all the time, we have an explosion of knowledge and along with it, an explosion of ignorance. No single person can possibly learn and master every field, so we have to specialize in areas that are of interest to us. Computers and Artifical Intelligence can, but that is another subject.

Whenever we don’t understand something, we feel out of control, ignorant, stupid, and ashamed. Our natural tendency is to abdicate to anyone who appears to know more than we do. We feel relieved that we can hand over the job of knowing and doing to them. Phew. The problem with this is that we put ourselves at the effect of other people and they may not care about our interests in the same way as we do! What if they lie to us? Not only that, we enable people to manipulate us by using technical sounding language and making us feel stupid, thus handing over the responsibility to them. An example of this is some accountants and lawyers (not all). Talk to some of them about your tax obligations and you may come away feeling like the police are at your door about to drag you off to jail! Very intimidating.

Most people feel ignorant or stupid whenever they encounter a word or term they do not understand. The feeling of stupidity and ignorance is shame. On top of that, we feel afraid of making mistakes. What a cocktail, fear, and shame. That’s nasty!

I used to feel this way about money, bookkeeping, accounting, taxes, the law, and investing. I hated feeling this way, so I committed to developing my competency in these areas so I could feel confident, in control and free to hire experts to help and partner with me, rather than abdicate to them, feel out of control all the time, and end up being overcharged!

I started my journey to competency by learning the nomenclature. Not easy, but worth it! The more terminologies I learned, the more confident I became. Knowledge is so empowering!

Let’s talk about money. Any person who is interested in financial freedom must learn the language of money. This will enable you to feel in control, confident, and secure in the knowledge that you know what money is, how it is “made”, how to spend it, manage it, grow it, and pass it on to others.

As you expand your money knowledge, you will run into words and terms you do not understand. Whenever that happens, or you notice your attention wandering, stop, and look up the definition of the word or term in a financial dictionary. In order to make it easy for you, we have put together a list of the most commonly used and misunderstood money, finance and wealth definitions> here. Enjoy!