How to appear financially literate at a dinner party
Dinner parties are stressful occasions. Sure, some of the people there are your good friends who forgive the occasional faux pas and ignore your blatantly hyperbolic statements. The stress comes from the lurking risk of an expert, or someone who won’t let your outlandish claims fly by. Every dinner party threatens to contain a nitpicker who will disagree when you loudly assert how you have the best savings account, or have a sure-fire way to make money in property.
The only solution to combat the Dinner Party Expert Threat (to my mind at least) is to know a little bit about everything, and to exercise restraint in your knowledge. This may come undone by someone particularly well-educated in a certain topic. But if your luck holds, you may just be able to impress the person next to you with your erudition and general knowledge.
Here are a couple of pointers to sound financially literate at a dinner party:
Know your terms
Rally is not a political gathering, but an upward movement of prices. Taking a view has nothing to do with the beautiful landscape, but an expression for forming an opinion on the stockmarket’s movements. Gross interest is in no way disgusting, but refers to interest before taxes are deducted.
I have a propensity to use big words before I really know what they mean, which can lead to some fairly awkward pauses at dinner parties. Learn from my mistakes and bone up; the list of terms from the New York Times will satisfy every definition-desire you could ever have.
Become well-read
This occasionally hilarious article on how to appear smart at dinner parties, suggest reading intelligent newspapers a couple of times a week. The Internet has made it even easier to access international journals and newspapers. Dinner Party Credit will be issued should you mention any of the following; the New York Times global equivalent, The International Herald Tribune, The Guardian’s business pages, The Journal of Finance, or The Economist.
Don’t be afraid…
… of topics that seem removed from every day life. Personal Finance for Dummies has a good collection of articles on a variety of topics. From mutual funds through to savings bonds, the articles are straightforward and helpful.
Get a feed
Putting together some RSS feeds can save you time for getting your daily source of finance/money news. I suggest signing up the the Savings Guide RSS feed which will email you every time a new article is posted.
- Savings Guide RSS Feed (click on the ‘subscribe’ button on the right hand side)
Wrap up
People can be funny talking about money, especially if it’s a long conversation about how you managed to get a packet of tea bags cheaply or how big your last raise was. If you’re lucky enough to be at a table with someone who is a real expert on something, I’d say the smartest thing to do would be shut up and enjoy.
That way, next dinner party you are at, you’ll have lots of facts and figures at your disposal to truly impress the person sitting next to you.
How do you sound in the know when talking about personal finance?
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