If you want to design a better future, start thinking in finance right now!
When people hear the word 'finance,' many think only of 'corporate finance.' But take a closer look and you'll find that finance thinking (financial thinking) is needed not just by companies but also at home and in everyday life. Finance thinking is a method for grasping every future impact by converting it into monetary terms, then comparing the options on the table to choose the most appropriate one. Together with the author—a certified public accountant who worked at Disney Japan and McDonald's Japan—let's explore the finance thinking that helps you make all kinds of decisions in life.
A Friendly Guide to Building Finance Thinking
When you hear the word 'finance,' complicated formulas and numbers are the first things that come to mind. Even in university business courses, finance is a subject where you have to memorize equations made up of formulas unfamiliar to humanities students. Yet content that seemed like it would stay confined to the lecture hall suddenly turns out to be necessary on the job once you enter the workforce. In other words, finance thinking is something everyone who earns and spends money needs.
Finance can be broadly divided into personal finance, corporate finance, and public finance. Of these, personal finance concerns how an individual or family plans their financial situation and manages their monetary resources, while corporate finance offers guidance on how a company should deploy its finances in order to maximize shareholder value.
As an individual, when you wrestle with questions like 'How should I go about buying assets such as a home, or a car?' or 'How should I manage my own personal finances?', it's hard to reach a decision easily if you haven't built the habit of thinking in numbers. Because performance metrics at work are judged in financial terms, finance thinking has become an essential skill even if you don't work in an accounting or finance department.
Following the actual order of decision-making, this book offers a friendly guide to thinking in finance, with concise summaries of key concepts and easy-to-understand examples. Predicting and applying future numbers rather than past ones—if you want to design a better future, start thinking in finance today!