Ten Things You Need to Know About Money

Few things affect your quality of life more than financial literacy.

The basics go well beyond being able to open up a bank account or get a job. They entail knowing how to make a wide variety of financial decisions throughout your life.

Understanding and applying these financial basics to the money you earn is likely to make you wealthy. Not having a grasp of them can leave you in a perpetual financial bind.

Here are the 10 essential financial basics:

Credit Cards

In today's world of credit, it's vital to understand credit card basics. Credit cards can be an asset or a liability depending on how you use them.

Learning the basics of how credit cards work -- and how you can use them to your advantage, while not using them when they aren't to your advantage -- is one of the most important financial lessons that you can master to ensure that your finances stay in order.

Compound Interest

: To grasp the full potential and power of investing, you need to understand how compound interest works and what it can do over time. Save $150 a month (approx $5 a day) without compound interest, and in 30 years you'll have $54,000.

Save the same amount with a return of 9% compounded interest and you'll have nearly $275,000 after the same 30 years. When you understand the fundamentals of compound interest and time working together, you see how saving even small amounts for your retirement years can have a huge effect.

Risk

When it comes to finances and trying to grow the money you have, there will always be risk involved. Understanding that risk is part of investing, and you can greatly increase your wealty by taking calculated risks to correspond with different points in your. At the same time, being too risk adverse or taking huge risks with your money in an attempt to get rich quick will likely leave you retirement-poor.

Retirement Vehicles

The government provides a number of retirement vehicles that allow you to invest with tax advantages to encourage you to save money for your retirement. These include 401(k)s and IRAs, which can mean the difference between not being able to retire and retiring in the lifestyle you desire. Understanding how these tools work to your benefit and taking advantage of them to save money tax-free is an essential part of basic financial literacy.

Index Funds

When it comes to investing, the first and most basic strategy you need to understand is stock index funds. Over time, you will need to learn many other aspects of investing, but understanding stock index funds is the first fundamental part of using the stock market to grow wealth.

It is a simple and cost-efficient way to get into the stock market when you may not have a lot of money or time to spend on investing, but it allows you to take full advantage of the compound interest discussed above.

Housing and Mortgage

It is important to understand the basics of housing and how mortgages work. For all of those who have been caught in the subprime mortgage crisis, this is one crucial financial lesson that they had not learned.

As the number of different mortgages available to borrowers increases, understanding how these new mortgages work becomes even more essential. It's important to remember that housing prices don't always go up, and that you need to make sure that mortgage debt is not only affordable on a monthly basis, but also affordable over the life of the mortgage loan.