make a budget. save money

once you have a 6 month emergency fund, you can start investing your future savings.

when investing it’s good to diversify your investments among no risk, low risk, and high risk investments.

successful investment is mostly a product of good habits and time, it’s not betting on memestocks or chasing investment trends.

the issue most folks have is that saving and investing is boring… they’d rather spend their money or make big risky investments because of the drama and emotional highs involved.

My dad’s favorite joke about being self-employed. He ran his own business for 40 years.

“Being self-employed is great! You only have to work half days! … And YOU get to decide which 12 hours.”

Can you be successful? Absolutely. But it’s a lot more work than just pulling your normal 9-5 in most cases.

Step 1: Born to a rich parent
Step 2: If step 1 fails, start from scratch, reincarnate, and try again (/kidding pls do not attempt to “reincarnate”)

1 minute economics

Can give you a brief starter on any terms, that you may need clarified.

Wait for the (hopefully soon) end to capitalism as we know it now, and hope for the best?

Otherwise just keep a decent 9 - 5 and watch your spending? Invest what you can in something that’s at the level of risk/reward you’re comfortable with.

You’ve got equities, debt and derivatives.

Equities are ownership into shares. These are the simplest to understand. You own a share of a company and thus are entitled to a % of the profits (though most companies today choose 0% as their decision).

Debt means funding… debt. SLABs (student loan backed securities), MBS (mortgage backed securities), bonds (government debt), bank loans etc. etc. These are surprisingly complex in practice but perhaps easiest to understand. There’s lots of different details to debt (callable, puttable, tax free, convertible, coupons, notes, bills, bonds, I-bonds, EBonds, 10Y, 3M, overnight repos). But in all cases, you lend money to someone, and later they try to return it to you + a little extra.

Derivatives (usually options but there are many kinds) are new inventions that are more complex. Ignore these as they are very very complex.

That’s about it.

The general recommendation is to buy an ETF for equities and an ETF for Bonds. ETF is just a combination of simpler investments that you pay 0.04% to 2% a year for convenience.

VOO takes the 500 biggest companies in the USA (aka the S&P 500) and buys mostly the biggest company and a very little bit of #500.

BND is a similar idea except it’s a whole bunch of different debts from across the entire economy.

So buy some equities (mostly equities), some bonds, and leave some cash in a high yield savings account. Done.

Stocks (aka VOO) make the most money on the average, but also loses money the most often.

Bonds (aka BND) makes middle amount of money but rarely loses money.

Cash / savings accounts never lose money (except inflation). But makes very very little. It’s still worthwhile to keep necessarily amounts as cash and this you should always be considering how much cash to keep.

1. Michael Lewis’s The Real Price of everything. (Rediscovering the six classics of economics)

2. The Ascent of Money by Niall Fergusen

3. Quinn and Turner’s Boom and Bust a Global History of Financial Bubbles.

4. Michael Lewis’s the Big Short. Entertaining sure, but a key element here is understanding synthetics. Think about classical supply and demand in an era of “synthetics” and failures of modern markets leading to the 2008 great financial crisis. Bond raters, lol.

Then wikipedia the greater fool theory, regulatory capture.

5. Stockholm Resilience Centre Planetary Boundaries to question the myths of perpetual growth.

6. David Foot - Boom, Bust and Echo to help with cohort analysis.

The most important thing is that when it comes to money and finance, most of the easily accessible material will tell you an idealized version of how things are supposed to work, not how they really work. See regulatory capture again.

Also, note that the people who are most knowledgable about the global financial system, banks and Investment Houses don’t make money on the “assets” they create. They make money selling it to rubes like you. That tells you what you need to know.

I learned a whole lot out of college from the “Choose FI” podcast. Listened to it while commuting to work. Go to their website and look up their recommended watch order and go from there. They have a lot of good ideas to get started.

Intelligent investor. For stocks.

I don’t remember the book on what bonds are and how they work. You should read about them too.

You should have a glance at derivatives, options and futures to understand what they are but investing in them is like playing hopscotch in a minefield.

Ray Dalio has a short YouTube video on how the macroeconomics work.

For learning about economic & financial concepts and how they impact the world check out the NPR podcast Planet Money. It’s free, episodes aren’t too long, and they cover some really interesting stories that involve businesses, supply chains, government policy, etc. a fun episode is #862: Big Government Cheese

read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, before taking youtubers or any other online financial/“investing” advice. was written over 100 years ago and it does better than anything else at providing…perspective…on how our (especially US) markets function

the US financial markets are the wild west, they operate more like a casino than a market, it’s why the rest of the world tolerates our shit…lack of regulation plus a largely under-educated population means the country as a whole serves as easy exit liquidity.

read a variety of books on whatever subject/area of “investing” your interested in, not videos. munger/buffet are good to follow along for most people, and to keep you from the worst gambling pitfalls. anyone selling courses and shit like that is at-best full of themselves (because everyone is a genius in a bull market) or worse a scammer looking for easy marks.

alot of big universities will have free online courses available for all sorts of subjects as well btw.

and last but not least…debt is 100% a trap, it is only when you understand this that debt becomes a tool