The Funny Money Crusade

There's a huge need for us all to be more financially literate. But what hope is there, when most finance writing is so dull? However, as our guest contributor argues, it needn't be that way.

The Woke Salaryman mixing money and manga to make finance interesting

It's no joke. Two thirds of the world is assessed to be financially ‘illiterate’ by a very easy standard. (You can test your knowledge below with ‘The Big Three’). While some of us campaign to get the subject taught in schools to address this, we aren't helped by the fact that so much writing about finance is painfully dull.

I speak from personal experience. As an economics student, I only used to read the 600-page set textbook if I couldn't get to sleep, and it worked every time. I even knew one of my peers was a much better economist than I only because I fell asleep while trying to copy his essay. He was clearly destined for academia, if not greatness.

But I am as sinning as sinned against. I have written hundred-page screeds about the internal workings and finances of things as obscure as Korean department stores that I doubt anyone ever finished. And I suspect even some of the stuff I thought was pretty good has lost readers in the first few sentences.

Actually I know that's true. When I started writing a book for my daughter, ‘Happy Ever After’, to teach her how to aim for financial independence (despite her having no financial knowledge or interest), my main concern was how to stretch her attention span to the end. I decided that the best plan was to co-opt the enemy and made her my first editor, giving her a very rough draft, and asking her to come back with anything she didn't understand, or if she was just bored. She came back a lot faster than I had hoped. Almost immediately.

Financial writing that sounds and looks good

This is because so much financial writing forgets the most important part of any writing: the reader. Too often we focus entirely on the information, without worrying about how it is being communicated, and to whom. It is like someone who talks without looking at the person they're with to see if they're listening, or even starting to nod off. All writing, even about finance, is about making that connection with another human being. 

I sometimes imagine two classes taking place on opposite sides of the same school corridor. In one, there's a finance professor scratching out detailed equations on a chalkboard, wondering why no one is paying attention. Across the hallway, there's a class called "Marketing 101" where a very smooth teacher, almost salesman-like, is telling the class not to tell people what they've got, but to focus on what the customer needs, on their pains and emotions.  

Somehow, these two teachers have never chatted in the staffroom. If they had, I suspect we might all know a lot more finance, because it would have been ‘sold’ to us, in the same way we have been sold luxury goods, exotic holidays, miracle skincare and all the other big consumer categories that have worked out how to tell us what they've got is what we really want. Instead, our finance professor's class keeps getting smaller and we write finance as though just providing the information is enough. As a result, few of us have the financial awareness, or security, we should be craving instead of those consumer goods.

If you think about all of your favourite pieces of writing, no matter how diverse and eclectic your tastes, from Homer to Harley-Davidson’s annual report, they all have one vital thing in common: you. Somehow they spoke to you. If you really enjoyed them, you will have felt like they were written for you, and just you. That could have been because the story was compelling or because they contained exactly the information you needed, in an easy-to-find structure, but whatever it was, the writer had communicated to you. The connection was made. 

So, how can your finance writing make those connections? 

Write for one person

Imagine talking to them. Imagine them reading it. Imagine them feeling emotional pulls at just the right moment. Don't anticipate an incredibly tough audience, as the nerves could stop you writing any words at all, and honestly, most audiences aren't as harsh as you can expect. They're more likely to be bored by you trying to impress them than if you just convey a useful idea simply, so assume they are on your side, and keep it simple.

Then find a reader who aligns with that audience. Even better if that was the person you were writing for. When my publishers Wiley asked me who my target market was for ‘Happy Ever After’ I told them a 17 year-old girl, a very strong reader but not so numerate, about to do a classics degree. When they asked me how I had such an accurate profile I told them that I had written it for my daughter, and that was her, and she had read it, understood it, and maybe even almost enjoyed it. She was also unbelievably valuable in telling me what she hadn't understood, which was essential.

The reader is always right

Anything that your reader says is too hard to understand, take it out. Re-do it. They are right. You are wrong. To perhaps coin a terrible word (my own jargon) ‘de-jargonise’ everything. Jargon can often be very useful shorthand, but you can't assume everyone else knows it, so remove whenever possible. And believe your first reader when they tell you it's jargon. And your second, and third. You might be using words that are alien to them and you can't re-start their education mid-article, teaching them words they don't know, so go back to words they do. 

Use words you can sense

Write words that can help you readers feel something. Touch it. See it. Hear it. Work your way through as many senses as you can in the piece, to try to capture people who are different sense-dominant to yourself. Telling a visual person to hear something doesn't work as well as showing them colour; tactile people love to feel texture. The more senses your writing engages, the fewer readers you are likely to dis-engage. 

Even financial writing needs a story

Find as many ways as you can to make it a story. When you can, put yourself in there, and try to make sure the reader stands beside you, sees, feels, hears what you're experiencing. This needn't take up huge amounts of space, but aligning yourself in the story makes it real. The reader knows you have lived it. One of the reasons we read is to understand life, and see others' experience through their eyes: give this to them, even when talking about numbers. 

Take your ego out of the equation

Even if you put yourself in the story, take your ego out of the equation. Once the word is on the page, whether it works or not is between the page and the reader, not you. If feedback says "this is dull, doesn't work", it won't help for you to argue, because you aren't there. If you can, switch jobs and become the publisher rather than the writer, making the edit now work for your purposes, rather than for the over-sensitive megalomaniac who wrote those words down a minute or two before. 

And then take out the equations

And even if you can't take your ego out of the equation, please take your equations out of the writing. There are rarely any good reasons to mix maths and words, and too many people who struggle with one can't do the other, so you lose both. The most re-written pages of my daughter's book were the ones with numbers. Some of them were unavoidable (it was a book about finance, after all) but not nearly as many of them were as necessary as I thought at the start. There are other ways to say it. 

And lastly? Don't tell finance jokes.

I once described the following as a joke: “Finance is 1% numeracy, 98% psychology, and 1% not worrying if it doesn't add up to start with.”

The hairs on the back of my neck still stand up thinking about the silence that was met with. Tough crowd.

Athough, at its heart, it has a very important truth, that finance is all about people and not numbers, to call it a joke means you expect people to laugh out loud, which they won't do if they’re also adding things up. It might even be impossible to do maths and laugh at the same time.

But that mustn't stop us from remembering that our reader is a person, who wants to be connected with, and perhaps entertained as much as informed. If we focus on that connection, creating and maintaining it, we can help them learn more of the things that they need to understand to take control of their financial lives.

That most of us can't do that today really isn't any kind of a joke. All of us writing about finance need to remember that, and work to fix it.

Source: The FT and Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (Answers: 1 More than $102. 2 Less than today. 3 False)

A financier based in Singapore, Michael Gilmore is the author of Happily Ever After: Financial Freedom Isn’t a Fairytale and The Thousand Dollar Journal and writes about finance as The Seven Dollar Millionaire.

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Michael Gilmore’s top financial writers everyone should be reading…

The Woke Salaryman

Different name, and totally different approach from the other side of the world, but He Ruiming and Wei Choon Goh explain finance very simply through a combination of crisp writing and immersive illustration. Having now quit their jobs in advertising, the Singaporean double-act can work full-time to put their everyman character in very real local and global problems. It feels like being emerged in a mix of manga and Western comic-books, not like reading a dull text. This is the future.

Patrick Jenkins

The Financial Times’ deputy editor, who has financial literacy at the cornerstone of his career, and has been key in establishing the newspaper’s first ever charitable foundation, the Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign.

Martin Lewis

AKA The Money Saving Expert. Every Tuesday night, Martin Lewis sends out an email newsletter to his 13 million subscribers (5 million more than Goop; 11.3 million more than the New York Times Briefing). In it, he talks about finance and money in a clear, concise way with the ambition of helping people attain ‘financial justice’. Lewis’s website MoneySavingExpert.com, founded in 2003, is one of the most popular sites in the UK, with 16 million visitors a month and The Financial Times called him “the most successful journalist in the world, ever”. In one year, he was the seventh most Googled celebrity in the UK, nestled between Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.

The Money Saving Expert: how Martin Lewis became the most trusted man in Britain – podcast

Faisal Islam

The BBC's economics editor, was also the economics editor at Channel 4 News and The Observer. He has covered every leg of the financial, Eurozone and rolling UK political crises, and is the author of The Default Line, on the financial crisis.

Tim Harford

Tim really does do the impossible: he makes statistics sexy. In a world which needs stories, he doesn't just plonk the numbers down in front of us, he makes sure we understand how we have potentially misunderstood them, and how re-imagining them we can improve our outcomes. Predominantly working at the Financial Times, his book ‘How To Make The World Add Up’ should be taught in school. Essential learning.

Morgan Housel

Having written ‘The Psychology Of Money’, Morgan Housel would get my ‘joke’ about finance being 98% psychology. Not only does he try to break down how we so regularly miss-see money, he even conveys this through 19 short stories, yes, stories, so the message sinks in. A great place to see if you're making the same mistakes.

Herald van der Linde

My good friend Herald is the chief equity strategist for HSBC, which might make some of his stock recommendations a little to esoteric for the average person. But his forthcoming book ‘Asia's Stock Markets From The Ground Up’ is an insightful ride through some of the wilder ends of the investing spectrum.

Jeremy Warner

The assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph is also one of Britain's leading financial and economic commentators. A recent column on the potential consequences of the world being so awash with debt was not only insightful, but issued the kind of warnings we don’t see often enough.

Whether you need to write in a winning way about finance or any other subject, at Forthwrite, we teach the business of good writing. As an editor, journalist and ad man, we know how to write faster and more fluently. Contact us at hello@forthwrite.co.uk or visit forthwrite.co.uk.