I have been asked to speak to you about the importance of being financially fit. But what is finance? The text books have a more elaborate way of defining finance but in common usage, the term finance simply means the management of large sums of money over time. For our purposes, we would define “finance” as simply the management of funds, not necessarily large.
Funds need to be managed because of two main factors: financial resources are scarce in relation to our aspirations and secondly because our receipt of funds and our need to incur expenditure do not normally coincide. By convention, most employees are paid monthly but their expenditure needs are spread across different times of the month.