On Thursday night, Britain decided to leave the European Union - the same European Union that was equal to America, if not surpassing it in population and total economy. Now they just lost the financial hub of the world and their second biggest economy.
On Friday morning, the stock market plunged because...people took money out of the stock market, I guess. I don’t really know why it happened. I suppose nothing can escape human error and paranoia which, besides cold hard fact, can dictate the market through volatile stretches. Scare investors enough and they take their money out, which causes the stock market to plunge in a cruel final act of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the words of John Mulaney, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I turned on the news and saw the DOW drop 200 points, and I can’t tell you...how frustrating that is...to not know what that means.”
The Brexit raises a bigger question. I still don’t understand basic finance and how does it even work? I can’t be alone on this.
I still don’t understand all the limitations of a credit card, but I have one. I’m still not even quite sure why these exist. Some guy somewhere thought, “Hey, you know what's a great idea, letting people spend money they don’t have - yeah, that’ll work.”
Put it this way, a crucial part of your life is almost impossible to understand without someone putting it into terms a five-year-old can understand, which is an embarrassing thing to admit, let alone write. Someday I’m going to be sitting in a bank nodding my head pretending that I know what they’re talking about.
At some point we all plan to buy a car, a house and any other expenditures that require a thousand signatures here...here...and here. Not knowing the basics of what goes on behind the curtain when you’re investing your life savings is terrifying. I would make even more fun of the process, but I don’t know enough about it to make fun of it. When did finances get so complicated?
This summer I was planning on investing in the stock market, and in my naive brain I thought I'd just hand over my money, get a receipt, and watch the stock go up and up. However, doing five minutes of research, I realized I’m in way over my head. To invest in the stock market you have to go through a brokerage firm - can’t just throw money at the screen and hope for the best, apparently. Some brokerage firms won’t even accept your business if you don’t have $1,000 to play around with. Even then, there’s a “transaction fee” for buying a stock, which if someone can please explain to me why a “transaction fee” exists, that would be nice. Give me one good reason that doesn’t involve them knowing they can get more money out of me. Anyway, the transaction fee, if investing the minimum $1,000 can be $50. Then cashing out the money, guess what, there’s another transaction fee of $50. So 10 percent of your investment is already gone, which means if you want to make money you have to have at least an 11 percent increase in your investment to make any money.
On the bright side, there are brokerage firms that have no minimum investment amount. TradeKing is one of them. However, before I could invest, my car started acting up again. Now the money I had reserved for the stock market is going toward my car. So on the bright side, life still works just as fine as it ever did.
In short, I would love if there was an easy version of finances I could subscribe to. Where we just keep our money in a savings account, have mortgages explained to us like we’re five years old, no tricks up anyone’s sleeves and my money is only secured by my hope in humanity, not a complex tax code or investment scheme.
