Finance is important in your everyday life. As you progress in your career, you may never have to direct an ad campaign or prepare the financial statements for a company. However, you will almost certainly be responsible for meeting or setting financial goals, optimizing investment returns, and ultimately, creating value. At its core, finance is simply the word used for the analytics that support decision-making.
The same is true at the individual level. Everyone is responsible for setting financial goals such as saving for large purchases, finding safe but return-generating investments for retirement, and creating a happy, comfortable standard of living. To do so, you might create a monthly budget to record your income and expenses so that you can analyze your cash flows to make changes and then find a way to save and invest money to achieve your personal goals.
Because many of you have never taken a finance course, you may get caught up in memorizing details or trying to figure out what a certain term means or what formula to use to value stocks. While learning the language of finance is a new and different experience, finance is fun—and it enables you to communicate with experts about important financial topics.