What is finance?

Finance is just the set of decisions you make about money: how you earn it, spend it, save it, and grow it over time. It sounds like a big academic word, but you already practice finance every time you choose between buying lunch out or cooking at home.

At its core, finance is about tradeoffs. Every peso you have can only be used once, so spending it on one thing means you can't spend it on something else. Learning finance means learning how to make those tradeoffs on purpose instead of by accident.

This course walks through the basics: telling income apart from expenses, building a budget, saving for emergencies, and understanding debt and interest. None of it requires a finance degree, just a bit of practice.

Choosing to bring baon to work instead of buying food every day is a finance decision. It's a small one, but it's still about weighing a tradeoff between cost and convenience.