Plain English

Every word this app uses

The words stay as they are — niche, domain, runway, coverage. They are the words the course uses and the words a buyer uses, so renaming them would leave you stuck the first time somebody else said one. Here is what each one means.

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39 words.

Asks: The number of times you actually asked somebody to pay you this month. Not applications thought about, not posts written — asks sent. Silence from a buyer counts as data, so log it.
Band: A position, not a grade. Each measure sorts you into a band and names what that band costs you. There is deliberately no single score, because three separate measures averaged into one number hide the one that is actually hurting.
Base rate: What usually happens to people like you who did this. Not what happened to the one person on YouTube. A real base rate beats your gut almost every time, and it takes an afternoon to find.
Chain: Everything one figure is joined to, in both directions. Your hours feed your true hourly rate, that rate shows up a leak, and the leak decides what you do first. Light one of those and the whole run lights with it. The full lesson →
Concentration: How few people your income depends on. Four clients at a quarter each is spread. One employer at 100% is not. Neither is wrong — it is a thing to know before somebody else decides it for you.
Continuity: The share of your income that would still arrive if you stopped for thirty days. A salary stops when you stop. A signed retainer might not. This is the number that separates income from a wage.
Coverage: How much of your essentials is paid by money that arrives without you working. Rent collected, a dividend, a product that sells while you sleep. If that money pays half your essentials, this reads 50%.
Does not apply: This step is not your situation. No debt to kill, nobody to ask for a second payer. It is a real answer and it is not a failure — a step that does not apply must never render as a box you left unticked.
Domain: The one industry you know well enough to say where its money leaks. Having worked in it is not enough. You know who signs, what a good month looks like, and what everybody in it complains about.
Essentials: Rent, food, utilities, transport, medicine. The bills that arrive whether or not you work. Not your total spending — eating out and subscriptions are real, but they are not the floor you have to clear.
Evidence: Something a stranger can check in ten minutes without asking you. A live link, a named person who will vouch for you, or dated published work. A claim on a CV does not count; a URL does.
Findability: Whether somebody who wants to hire you can find you at all. Count the platforms where your work is visible and reachable. Excellent and invisible pays the same as average and invisible.
Inherited rule: A money sentence you did not choose and have never tested. "Business is a gamble." "A government job is safe." It arrived from somebody who meant well, in conditions that no longer exist, and it is still making decisions for you.
Leak: Money leaving every month for something that buys you nothing — interest, a subscription nobody uses, a fee. Called a leak rather than a cost because it drains whether or not you are looking.
Leverage: Something that keeps working when you stop. A tool, a product, a team, an audience, a share in a business. Skill is what you earn with; this is what earns without you standing there.
Niche: The one skill you can name in five words and somebody could buy today. Not five certificates — one thing, one inch wide and one mile deep. If naming it takes a paragraph, you do not have one yet.
PAR: Problem, Action, Result. Turns a duty into a claim. Not "responsible for handling accounts" but "invoices ran 40 days late; I rebuilt the chase sequence; collection dropped to 12 days." Say I, not we, and put a number in the Result.
Premortem: Before you commit, picture it having already failed and write down why. It surfaces the risk you were quietly refusing to name, and it forces you to set the exit and the tripwire while you are still calm.
Reachable savings: Money you could actually spend this week if something went wrong. A committee-approved fund you cannot touch for two years is savings, but you cannot get at it, so it buys you no runway.
Reading: One dated sitting of one instrument, kept for ever. Score the audit in August and again in October and both survive. Without that, re-scoring destroys the only thing worth comparing against.
Red, amber, green: Three or four yeses out of the four questions makes a task red — the bottom rung. Two makes it amber. Nought or one makes it green. The colour is about the task, never about you.
Referee: One person who will confirm what you did — named, with their job title, and with a route a stranger could use to reach them. A job title on its own is not checkable. “My old manager” names nobody.
Reversible decision: A door that opens both ways — a trial month, one small order, an honest conversation. Decide these in ten minutes; walking through is how you collect the facts. Save the long method for the doors that lock behind you.
Rule of 72: How long money takes to double. Divide 72 by the yearly return. At 6% it is twelve years, at 9% eight, at 12% six. Useful as an arithmetic check on anybody promising you fast.
Runway: How many months you could pay the essentials if all the work stopped tomorrow. Reachable savings divided by essentials. Savings of 300,000 against essentials of 100,000 a month gives you three months.
Snapshot: A dated copy of every figure, taken when you close a month. Nothing is overwritten, so in October you can read what August actually said instead of what you remember it saying.
Surplus: What is left after everything you spend. Income minus total spending. Below zero means the gap is being paid for by savings or by debt, and one of those runs out.
T · B · F: Three things a future-proof position needs together. T is Technology — your niche. B is Business — your domain. F is Future — a booked, repeating slot for studying where your field is going. Two out of three has a name and a price.
Task exposure: How much of your week sits in work a machine can already do. A task scores red when it is repeatable, digital, needs no judgement and carries no consequence. Red is not a failure — it is the part to move first.
Ten-minute check: The one bar proof is held to. Could somebody who has never met you confirm the claim for themselves in under ten minutes, without asking you for anything? A private folder fails it. A public page with your name on it passes. The full lesson →
The five profits: Purpose, Financial, Relational, Time, Spiritual. Five separate questions, deliberately never averaged. A yes in the money column does not pay for a no in the other four, and one score would hide exactly that.
The life ledger: Your day counted in hours, then multiplied by the years left. It is a subtraction, not a prediction — a yardstick for comparing your own habits against each other, and nothing about how long anybody will live.
The rule ledger: The money rules you inherited, written down and priced. Name the rule in the sentence you heard it in, say who said it, work out what obeying it costs you in a year, then write the replacement in your own words.
The sequence: The order to fix things in, worked out from your own figures. Doing the right things in the wrong order wastes years — saving into a fund at 8% while a card charges 40% loses money every month it continues. The full lesson →
Top payer share: How much of your money comes from your single biggest payer. One client at 70% means one email can cut your income by 70%. It is a measure of risk, not of success.
True annual rate: What a debt really costs over a year, once the monthly figure is compounded. 3% a month is not 36% a year — it is about 43%, because each month's interest joins the balance the next month charges on. The full lesson →
True hourly rate: What one hour of your work actually pays. Take everything you earned, divide by every hour the work ate — overtime, commute, evening messages, all of it. Earn 200,000 a month for 250 real hours and your true rate is 800, not the 1,250 your contract implies. The full lesson →
Unworked income: Money that arrives without a shift being done. Rent, dividends, a fund, a share of a business. Trading does not belong here — it stops the week you stop watching the screen, which is the flattering mistake this page exists to catch.
Wealth: What you own minus what you owe. Not what you earn. Someone on 6,000 a month with a 200,000 house and no debt is worth more than someone on 20,000 who owns nothing.

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