Free Online Finance Course
This free online course aims to introduce you to the basics of what money is,
what influences the value of money, and how to manage and invest money.
Many people prefer to learn from watching YouTube videos today.
So this course has been formatted to be a series of YouTube videos anyone can watch
at their own speed, on their own schedule, in a sequential order,
to get a better understanding of these important foundational concepts
required to better understand how to manage and invest their own money.
Lesson 1: What is money?
We need to understand what money is and what influences it’s value in order to succeed at managing money.
Once we truly understand what money is and how it works, we can then make better decisions about how to get it to work for us and grow.
We will start learning about what money is in this video by learning the history of money. The video starts with talking about gold, but then gives a good summary of the history of money.
In summary, money today no longer holds any intrinsic value or utility. Today, money or currencies are fiat currencies whose value is based on trust in the issuing government and it’s economy. If you hold any of your wealth in any fiat currencies, you need to be aware of the general global trust in the government whose currency you hold. The value of that currency will rise and fall based on global trust in that countries government and economy.
In 1944, the US dollar became the primary global reserve currency.
The US dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency and the largest share of global official reserves. At market prices, gold overtook the euro in 2024 to become the second-largest reserve asset. When countries or individuals start to lose trust in the US government and it’s fiat currency, they start to transition more of their assets into assets they trust more (such as gold or the currencies of other countries).