How I Became A Finance Writer With Zero Experience
I still remember 4 years ago when I joined my first job; my boss told me to start writing posts on ‘Google Docs,’ and even though I had joined there as a finance writer, I had no idea what Google Docs were.
Now, you can guess how dumb I was.
The funny part is, I wasn’t completely clueless about finance.
I had done non-medical in 12th and then a BBA in Finance.
So, technically, I had studied finance.
But knowing finance and knowing how to write about finance are two very different things.
And I had zero experience with the second one.
I had never worked as a writer.
I had never written for a finance company.
I didn’t know how SEO worked.
I didn’t know how content teams worked.
And I definitely didn’t know how to make a boring financial topic interesting.
But somehow, I got the job.
Through LinkedIn.
And that’s where the real learning started.
Most of my learning happened on the job
I would get a topic.
I’d research it.
Write something.
Get feedback.
Rewrite it.
And then do it all over again.
A lot of my early career was basically:
“I have no idea how to do this.”
followed by:
“Okay, let me figure it out.”
And slowly, I did.
One thing I realised pretty quickly was that finance writing isn’t about trying to sound intelligent.
It’s about making someone understand something they didn’t understand five minutes ago.
I stopped trying to use complicated words just because I was writing about finance.
I started writing the way I would explain something to a friend.
That changed my writing completely.
Then I started freelancing
My first freelance opportunity also came through LinkedIn.
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Someone reached out to me, I took up the work, and that’s how freelancing started.
But I didn’t want to just wait for people to find me.
So I started cold emailing creators.
I’d find people whose content I liked, write to them and ask if they needed help with their content.
Most didn’t reply.
A few did.
And those few replies changed everything.
One client became another.
Then another.
Soon, I was writing for finance creators, fintechs and brands.
Blogs.
LinkedIn posts.
Instagram content.
YouTube scripts.
Newsletters.
I was slowly doing much more than I had imagined when I started.
Four years later
Today, I’ve spent more than four years writing about finance.
I’ve written about stocks, mutual funds, credit cards, RBI regulations, government schemes, fintech startups and probably every other finance topic you can think of.
And the funny thing is, I still get briefs that make me think:
“Okay… how am I going to write this?”
The difference is that now I know I’ll figure it out.
And I think that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learned.
You don’t need to know everything before you start.
I didn’t.
I didn’t even know what Google Docs was.
I just started.
Then I learned.
Then I wrote.
Then I got better.
And somewhere along the way, finance writing became my career.
If I could tell the 4-years-ago version of me one thing, it would be this:
You don’t need to have it all figured out.
Just start.
