This means that individuals can easily create a Monero account for themselves as well as a joint account to share with their partner, and individual accounts for their children. Similarly, a business could create separate accounts for each division or group. Since Monero's @transaction fees are quite low, moving funds between accounts is not an expensive exercise.
Those familiar with Monero's predecessors will be more familiar with the term *wallet* to describe this. In Monero we call this an account, and it is a private account owned and operated by a Monero user.
When you manage your own Monero Account with the private @spend-key, you are solely responsible for the security of your funds. Thankfully, Monero makes it very easy to backup your account. When creating a Monero account for the first time you will be given a unique @mnemonic-seed for your account that consists of 13 or 25 words in the language of your choosing. **This seed is the only thing you need to backup for your account**, and so it is imperative that it is written down and stored securely.Never store this seed in a form or location that would allow someone else to see it!
Your account contains all of the Monero @transactions you have sent and received. Your account balance is a sum of all the Monero you've received, less the Monero you've sent. When using Monero you may notice that your account has two balances, a locked and an unlocked balance. The unlocked balance contains funds that can be spent immediately, and the locked balance contains funds that you can't spend right now. You may receive a transaction that has an @unlock-time set, or you may have sent some Monero and are waiting for the @change to come back to your wallet, both situations that could lead to those funds being locked for a time.
Your account is based on two keys, a @spend-key and a @view-key. The @spend-key is special in that it is the single key required to spend your Monero funds, whereas the @view-key allows you to reveal your @transactions to a third party, for example for auditing or accounting purposes. These keys in your account also play an important role in Monero's @transaction's privacy.