Finance Professionals Must Have Situational Awareness.

By Brent Pritchard

People who study and train in self-defense will tell you the importance of having situational awareness. If you’re not sure what this is, think scanning a dark parking lot as you walk to or from your car, understanding that it would be out of place for a person to be wearing a down jacket anywhere in the summer, and knowing the location of the exit as soon as you enter a building so to improve your chances of survival if stuff goes down. In short, it’s the ability to read the room or space you find yourself in, understand what’s what, and then how to effectively respond to a situation.

This image was created with the assistance of DALL·E and prompts from Brent Pritchard.

Here’s what’s not going to happen. The person intent on committing a crime or inflicting harm is not going to tap you on the shoulder and give you a heads up about what happens next.

In the classroom, finance students will raise their hands and ask me a question like, “Is this question asking for the ‘future value’ or something else?”

There are two things that employers dislike, three that are an abomination to them: self-righteousness, a lying tongue, and one who sows discord among team members.

One thing for all aspiring finance professionals must be true: awareness of the Time Value of Money. But you must know how to apply the Mathematics of Finance to analyze and evaluate real-world Time Value of Money situations.

Here’s an excerpt from my book Would Your Boomerang Return? What Birds, Hurdlers, and Boomerangs Can Teach Us About the Time Value of Money (2023):

Q14. In five years, you expect to have $60,000 in a savings account. Starting at the end of the sixth year and continuing through the end of the eleventh year, you expect you’ll be able to save $5,000 annually. At the beginning of the eleventh year, you will make annual withdrawals totaling $7,500 through and including the end of the twentieth year. Assume a true annual investment yield of 2.25% with quarterly compounding the first eleven years and a true annual investment yield of 2.00% thereafter. What do you expect to have for a remaining balance in your savings account twenty years from now?

If you got $28,590.19 then you can also answer the bigger question, “Do you have finance situational awareness?” with a response that would please a current or prospective employer.

What is the one thing that you feel holds you back when analyzing a real-world question, therefore making it a problem?

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Brent Pritchard is an author and college finance educator with over two decades of industry experience and cofounder of Boxholm Press, LLC, a family-owned-and-operated publishing company providing educational content, products, and services. He pioneers an innovative and approachable new way of learning and teaching the Time Value of Money as well as thought leadership in other business topics. His most recent book is Would Your Boomerang Return? You can contact him on his website here.

Finally Write Resume Bullet Points Right!

By Brent Pritchard

I’m done giving students their resume bullet points. Of course I’m going to continue to teach students some best practices related to the resume and the like. Like it or not (students), I’m going to help you finally write resume bullet points right!

I’m sure you’ve heard the following saying:

“Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day; teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.”

— Ancient proverb

You could say I’m done “helping” students fall short of their true potential, which can be realized when they fish around for the information needed to effectively tell their professional story.

Here’s an excerpt from the free bonus chapter to my book Would Your Boomerang Return? What Birds, Hurdlers, and Boomerangs Can Teach Us About the Time Value of Money (2023):

You’re almost ready for the “hot seat.” First, let me share something that I have figured out from working in industry. The smartest people in the group have mastered the art of asking really great questions. So much so that they deliberately don’t ask you the question they really want to ask you. In other words, it’s the trailing unspoken question that may be of more interest to the interviewer. I’ve seen this done with such precision and excellence that I’m a little jealous of those who can do this with ease. After all these years in business, I can’t figure out if it’s the leadership skill in the person helping to lead the other to their way of thinking or if it’s because some people don’t like to be too direct. Might be a little of both, especially because of office politics and people wanting to climb corporate ladders.

The best leaders not only ask great questions of others, but also of themselves. You can employ this tactic to write effective resume bullet points.

But before you can do that, you need to call it like it is: a living document that can always be improved. This requires getting out of your own way: embracing that you are both a source of the problem and the solution. A great degree of agency can follow this realization.

Remember that the job of the resume is not to get you the job; rather, to get you the interview. The former comes down to skills and experiences!

How do you best tell your professional story one (bullet point) line at a time? By asking the right questions (of yourself):

• What did you (do)…?

• Why did you (do what you did)…?

• How did you (know that your work produced a positive outcome)…?

These three bullet points will help you finally write resume bullet points right! Don’t believe me?! It’s this simple:

• What did you do as a Stocker? I made sure product got from the warehouse to the retail floor.

• Why did you move product from the warehouse to the retail floor? It was important that shelves which were emptied from the prior day’s sales be mostly restocked before the store opened and customers started to shop.

• How did you know that your work produced a positive outcome? Working alongside others, we unloaded multiple pallets before the store opened, contributing to the customers’ shopping experience and daily store sales that averaged around $35,000.

Still not there? If you get stumped, you can also look at it from the employer’s perspective:

• What were you hired to do?

• Why is this role really needed?

• How can the company stay in business?

This makes it crystal clear:

• What were you hired to do? I was hired to unload pallets of merchandise and stock showroom shelves.

• Why is this role really needed? To help the team and stock shelves in a timely manner.

• How can the company stay in business? Keep customers happy and sell things!

Here’s how it all comes together (for the fictitious character Roy G. B. IV):

Copyright 2025 Brent Pritchard. All rights reserved.

(In case you missed it, the comma is indigo and the period is violet. Who can really tell the difference anyway?! Long story short, you don’t have to use a comma in the bullet point, just like you don’t have to use a period. This would result in our character being known as Roy G. B. or Roy G. B. I or Roy G. B. V: you get the point.)

The “leader” that is “Assisted” sets the tone for the rest of the resume bullet point. It’s pretty clear that this person wants to draw attention to the fact that they are a team player, someone who works well with others.

This is what I call the STARE tactic:

• Skill

• Task

• Action

• Result

• Experience

(Green gets to the Result… You can’t make this stuff up!)

Are you sold yet? For the rest of the story on the resume and job-search process, check out the free bonus chapter:

How long did it take you to rewrite one of your resume bullet points using these (tailored) questions?

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Brent Pritchard is an author and college finance educator with over two decades of industry experience and cofounder of Boxholm Press, LLC, a family-owned-and-operated publishing company providing educational content, products, and services. He pioneers an innovative and approachable new way of learning and teaching the Time Value of Money as well as thought leadership in other business topics. His most recent book is Would Your Boomerang Return? You can contact him on his website here.

What Bang for the Buck?!

By Brent Pritchard

Growing up, I remember my Grandpa Schlieman and uncles bird hunting on the farm around the holidays. I never remember them deer hunting. I’m pretty sure venison sausage would have been one of my earliest memories.

I remember my first finance class like it was yesterday—both as a student and educator. Your first finance class is fertile ground for one-liners. You know the kind I’m talking about: risk requires return.

Here’s an excerpt from my book Would Your Boomerang Return? What Birds, Hurdlers, and Boomerangs Can Teach Us About the Time Value of Money (2023):

If compound investment yield is an investor’s best friend, time is a close second. In the Time Value of Money nomenclature, the expected return on investment or true investment yield is denoted with an “i.” It’s the exponent “N” that makes return on return on investment or compound investment yield possible. It’s because of the power of “N” that Albert Einstein reportedly thought that “Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.” Implicit in this statement is that he thought it was even more powerful than gravity, which ironically helped the smaller snowball roll down the mountain in the comic strip illustration!

The true investment yield or expected return on investment as denoted by “i” is not to be confused with Return on Investment (ROI). ROI doesn’t consider that money has time value. To illustrate this point, let’s reconnect with our “investor” from the last chapter who had a bird in the hand and was staring at two in the bush.

The ROI on a successful “bird investment” would have been 100%: two birds for one. But there was no mention of time. Was this investor hunter thinking that delaying consumption—this takes on a new meaning—of the bird in the hand was worth two in the bush…in twelve months? In other words, should 100% have been thought of as a true annual investment yield? Time is an important consideration when it comes to determining the true investment yield. See how ROI ignores time. ROI has application in practice, and there’s a time and a place for using this and other metrics to measure and evaluate potential investments. But it’s not in the context of the Time Value of Money.

Since ROI doesn’t consider that money has time value, it’s incompatible with the Mathematics of Finance. ROI is a simple measure of return. When we dive deep into the discussion regarding the true investment yield, you’ll discover that the word simple or nominal is used to describe an investment yield that doesn’t consider the effects of compounding.

So if the investment metric ROI isn’t “i,” then what is? That would be the Internal Rate of Return (IRR or as I like to write it, i(RR)). The i(RR) is the discount rate that sets the Present Value of the future expected cash flows over the investment period equal to the investment. Unlike ROI, i(RR) is Time Value of Money approved! The time span of the i(RR) must correspond with the time span in between the periods or payments (on the timeline). For example, if the time span in between period markers on the timeline represents annual periods, then the i(RR) is a true annual investment yield. A product of the finance industry, of course i(RR) is going to consider time.

And if that’s not enough, here’s the starter:

Photo by Brent Pritchard. Copyright 2023 Brent Pritchard. All rights reserved.

What is your earliest memory from a finance class(room)?

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Brent Pritchard is an author and college finance educator with over two decades of industry experience and cofounder of Boxholm Press, LLC, a family-owned-and-operated publishing company providing educational content, products, and services. He pioneers an innovative and approachable new way of learning and teaching the Time Value of Money as well as thought leadership in other business topics. His most recent book is Would Your Boomerang Return? You can contact him on his website here.