This is the Business English Podcast, episode 545, idioms that can keep you from going belly up.
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Hello, Lindsay.
How are you?
Doing great today.
Aubrey has everything for you.
Excellent.
I am curious.
If you're willing to admit, have you ever made a bad financial decision?
I have one if you don't want to share.
I've made my own for sure.
But do you want to share yours, Aubrey?
Go for it.
So we bought a home, but it was like a small condo when we first got married.
And then we kept it.
So the first bad decision was keeping it before 2008 when we moved to New York.
And then the market crashed and it was worth next to nothing.
And then our second mistake, we like held on to it.
We had all of these headaches trying to rent it for a long time.
And then we sold it in maybe 2016.
And I wish I could turn back time and keep it, because now it's worth so much more than we sold it for.
And our daughter could have lived there.
Oh no.
Hindsight is 20-20.
Hindsight is always 20-20.
The truth is when you're in the moment.
I mean we're thinking about hopefully buying our next home soon in the next couple of years.
And it's like, if we buy, is it going to be a mistake?
Is it going to be the best thing we could have done?
It's just so hard to know.
It's so hard to know.
Is the market going to crash after?
Are interest rates going to be better?
And it made sense to us because it had been so low and it had come up to where we made a little bit of profit, right.
I wish I had known the future, but you don't know the future.
I think a lot of people, unless they were insiders in the banking or the home mortgage loan industry.
The 2008 crash was a total surprise.
Yeah, I was surprised.
You know, because there were nefarious things happening in the background but no one really knew about those things that were happening.
So I love the word nefarious.
It's so true.
That's like intentional wrongdoing.
Yeah, for sure.
Yes.
Well, this is an interesting topic today, Aubrey.
What are we getting into on the show?
Yeah, this is part two of a series answering a listener question about finance vocabulary used at work.
So stay to the end for details about part one.
You can definitely listen to these out of order.
Yes, this is good.
And that was from a great student question originally.
So again, go back and pay attention to Julia's question.
So yeah, so we're going into the next piece today.
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Okay.
Yes.
So Julia had asked us about several different idioms.
Some of which were about financial profit, some about financial loss.
So today we're talking about those about financial loss.
The first one is lose one's shirt, which implies that you lose almost everything, right?
And this is interesting.
As I came up with examples, we do use this one more for individuals, not really companies.
I think just because a company isn't something that wears a shirt, that's a person.
So we don't use this as often to talk about a company experiencing some kind of financial loss.
No, that's a good point.
You wouldn't really say that corporation lost their shirt.
No, it's more about someone that maybe took some kind of risk and lost their shirt, right?
Maybe in some recession or they got scammed or something, maybe.
So, for example, several investors lost their shirts when the startup collapsed.
And this is interesting, too, because it's a very informal idiom.
So, depending on the context and who you're talking to, like if you, if these are people who were close to them.
This is a very sort of flippant way to describe it as well.
It is a little bit flippant and that's another good vote.
Gosh, the vocabulary coming up today, Aubrey is just astounding.
Yeah.
That kind of means you're not taking it seriously, right?
If you know someone who experienced financial ruin, This is a very un, Not disrespectful, but just insensitive way to treat it very lightly, to not give it the kind of weight that it deserves.
Yeah, and always the.
When we humanize something, we know the person, we always have more empathy, right.
So yeah, you're less likely to use that if it's a friend of yours, right?
That's told you the story and you could see the results, right?
They're picking up the pieces now, right?
Not good.
And like we said, we wouldn't say it for a company.
We wouldn't say like, oh, the CEO warned that the company might lose its shirt.
No, right?
It's about an individual that would actually wear a shirt, maybe lose a shirt.
But a company could go belly up, don't you think?
A company could go bankrupt or fail.
Go belly up.
Yeah, it means to go bankrupt or fail.
Yeah, because if you imagine like if you fall on your back, your belly is upwards, right?
Right, yes.
So the retailer went belly up after failing to adapt to online sales.
And this happened, You know probably happened in the dot com boom and then has happened.
May this will happen to many companies, guaranteed in the AI boom, for sure.
Yeah, it happens to restaurants.
There's a restaurant near our home that has gone through, has changed so many times just since we've lived here.
Was like a breakfast place and then an Indian restaurant, which was delicious.
I'm shocked that they went belly up.
Now it's like a little bar and grill.
I don't know what it is about that location that they keep going belly up.
Oh, I wonder if there's something about like the landlord or something.
Maybe, that's a good point.
Yeah, it could be the owner of the building, yeah.
Or without new funding, the supplier is likely to go belly up within months.
Okay.
So yeah, I mean, this we could use at work, don't you think probably?
Yes.
Right.
It is also a little bit informal, much more formal vocabulary.
It would be to go bankrupt, to go out of business.
Right.
So this is a little more informal, but depending on the conversation, we would use this at work.
Yeah.
And what's the formal way to say to go?
Is it chapter seven or let's see.
Chapter seven bankruptcy.
Yeah, something like this.
So there's also other ways that people will say when someone goes bankrupt, but we'll go into that another day.
It's an interesting follow up, all of the different ways we say that someone goes bankrupt.
Yeah.
All right.
And then go broke.
Okay.
So also very casual.
This is when someone runs out of money.
The founder nearly went broke trying to keep the business afloat, right?
Or many small firms go broke during prolonged economic downturns.
So again, slightly informal, but yeah, just means to experience financial loss to run out of funds.
Yeah.
And it's also, people will also refer sometimes to themselves and they'll say, I'm broke.
I can't go to the concert, right?
Yeah.
And it doesn't usually mean like zero, which means not a lot of excess funds, right?
Yeah, it doesn't.
Yeah, it's a little overly emphasized.
Hopefully, right.
I can't go to dinner.
I'm broke.
Yeah, right.
Or to be wiped out.
This is to lose everything suddenly.
The market crash wiped out years of profit overnight, right?
Just destroyed it.
You know, people had wealth on paper and then it was gone.
Vanished.
Right.
Or a single failed contract wiped out the company's cash reserves.
And then burning through money is the last one.
This is or we say like, what's your burn rate?
Sometimes we say that.
Right.
What's your burn rate?
Spending very fast.
How fast are you spending investor money?
Right.
Um, the company burned through its venture capital in less than a year, right?
Or poor cost controls caused the department to burn through its budget.
So you say burn through money, burn through a budget means to use it all, spend it all.
And again, this one also could be used at home or in your social life.
And, you know, I gave you your allowance.
Did you burn through your allowance already?
Something like that.
I've definitely said that to my children.
Yeah.
They now are able to, you know how you can pay through Apple Pay on an Apple Watch.
So my younger kids are able to do that with their allowance and they burn through that allowance.
Yeah, for sure.
Buying candy, right?
Exactly.
Good stuff.
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All right, Aubrey, let's do a role play.
Here we are investors and we're discussing a startup.
Okay.
Yeah, I'll start us out.
Yes.
Have you seen the latest financials for Bright Tech?
They might go belly up if they don't secure more funding soon.
Yeah, I noticed that.
They've burned through a lot of money on R&D.
Yeah, I heard some early backers lost their shirts after investing in the Series A round.
Not surprising.
And with the company drowning in debt, any delay in revenue could be catastrophic.
Do you think it's too late?
Are we looking at a company that's about to go broke?
Possibly.
If their next product flops, everyone's going to be wiped out.
Yeah.
Interesting.
The conversations that are probably had by investors.
Very different from the conversations I have.
Yeah.
No, it's true.
But I think honestly, like investors, they do the math and they just assume a certain percentage.
I have no idea.
Maybe 75% are going to fail.
I think that's the math they do.
I don't know.
I'm not an investor, but I think that's what they do.
And they just, they take their bets and they try to make an educated guess, you know?
I did see some statistic about.
It was like um, most successful entrepreneurs failed, or like had like three or four businesses fail before one succeeded, which makes sense, but it also stands to reason that investors are willing to take on that risk.
Yep i, and exactly, and i've seen that too.
I've seen that the average age of a successful startup founder is more like in their 40s and 50s because they've had those failures right yeah, and in fact i had.
I was listening to a podcast and it was an investor and they Said something to the effect of they would prefer to invest in someone that had had those failures and knew what that was and exhibited this stick-to-itiveness through it.
Oh, yeah.
In the startup scene, people wear their failures like a... like a badge of pride.
But I think we have this narrative that we developed sometime in the 2010s, especially around like Facebook, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, the young phenom founder.
And we there are movies about these young founders in tech that we developed this other narrative that they're all 20 something college kids.
Right.
But it's not true necessarily.
Rarely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's really interesting.
Okay, so let's go through this, Aubrey.
So here you said, have you seen the financials for Bright Tech?
They might go belly up if they don't secure more funding.
So speaking casually here with another fellow investor, maybe having coffee, right?
They might fail.
They might go bankrupt.
Yeah, exactly.
And you said, yeah, they've burned through a lot of money on R&D.
It just means they've used a lot of funds.
Exactly.
And then I said, you said, I heard some early backers lost their shirts.
And again, this is like commentary language.
We are sitting on the sidelines, right?
And talking about opportunities.
We don't know them personally, or we probably wouldn't say it that way.
Exactly.
And you're not talking to the founders, of course, right?
This is very different language that we use when we sit on the sidelines right and talk about perspective opportunities versus being in the game right.
Exactly.
It's interesting.
Yeah, and then you said with the company drowning in debt, any delay in revenue could be catastrophic.
This is sort of a bonus phrase.
We use a lot of idioms about drowning or being underwater when you are struggling in some way.
Yeah, that's interesting.
That could be another episode.
Yeah, for sure.
Probably a little further down the road because we need to get away from this debt talk, but yeah.
Right.
Let's be positive after this one for a while.
That signs the universe, right?
Right.
And then you said, do you think it's too late?
Are we looking at a company that's about to go broke?
Right?
Yeah.
Meaning about to fail again, about to go out of business.
Yes.
And then I said, possibly if their next product flops, everyone's going to be wiped out.
Right.
And that means to maybe lose everything either suddenly or accidentally.
Could be a long time coming, right?
You're wiped out, meaning you have no more funds, no more success.
Yes, good.
So guys go check out the part.
Was it part one of the?
Yeah, part one.
Turn a profit with these financial phrases, right?
Check that out.
Yes, awesome.
If you missed that one, be sure to hit follow.
You're definitely missing great episodes here at All Ears English.
And yeah, this was fun.
It was definitely more fun to talk about the financial profit than the financial loss.
But we talk about them both at work and in everyday conversations.
Yeah.
I mean, you can't have the upside without the downside, right?
Like we would never have profits if we can't have the potential to lose money too.
So that's kind of something that is sort of exciting about business in a way, I think.
I don't know.
There's a little risk in there.
So good stuff.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Aubrey, you have a good rest of your day, okay?
We'll talk to you soon.
Thanks, Lindsay.
See you next time.
Take care.
Bye.
Bye.
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