Congratulations on being wise enough with your money at such a young age to do your research and ask questions. That's exactly what you should continue doing, as it will pay off in the long run far more than any single investment you can make right now.

Along those lines I would invest a small amount of that money in some basic books about money that will help you develop a fundamental philosophy about your relationship with money and building wealth. Ebook, blogs and apps all have their benefits, but you really should have a basic financial library of physical books you can have on hand.

Your Money or Your Life:
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143115762

The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1533667926%5D(https://www.amazon.com/dp/1533667926/

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118921283/

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy https://www.amazon.com/dp/1589795474/

That short list is in no way complete, but will get you started.

As far as websites/blogs/free reads here's a few to consider:

http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

https://yourmoneyoryourlife.com/book-summary/

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/blog/

https://www.thesimpledollar.com/

It's great that you have a nice little lump sum of money to invest right now, but the key to building wealth generally won't involve lump sums every now and then and finding places to put them. The key is to discipline yourself to set aside portions of any amount money that comes in and have an automatic system to invest it and let it grow without touching it.

Have a plan for every paycheck, bonus, tax refund, inheritance, bank heist money :) you come into to have a portion funneled into your investments before you're tempted to find other, unlimited, things to do with it.

This is the greatest book probably ever written on that concept:

http://www.ccsales.com/the_richest_man_in_babylon.pdf

Having a goal, a plan for getting there, and the discipline to actually execute it will make you wealthy. Wealth gives you choices, freedom, and opportunity, and the earlier you start building it, the easier it will be to have these things. If you don't appreciate how important those are to living a good life, I guarantee you will in the years ahead.

At some point you will hear the name Warren Buffett (if you haven't already). He's the single greatest investor who's ever lived and my personal favorite. Once you have the basics down, and you might have further interest in investing I would recommend studying him. Even though there are countless books and websites devoted to him, he's already left us nearly everything you need to know about investing right there on his simple company website in the form of his annual letters--basically a free master class on investing, written by a genious who also happens to have great wit:

http://berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

In a much broader sense beyond investing, there is a book more than a hundred years old that discusses getting to wealth in a very interesting and powerful way. I've used it as inspiration from a standpoint as a business person, but I think it's worth studying seriously for anyone trying to build wealth.

I believe you can still get a free copy here:

http://scienceofgettingrich.net/subscribe.html

If you don't want to subscribe, just Google "The Science of Getting Rich".

And here's a good audio version as well:

https://archive.org/details/TheScienceofGettingRich

No matter what philosophy and path you take, I always include another personal recommendation to set aside a small portion of your portfolio into something "alternative" that interests you and might have the potential to build or at least preserve wealth. For me it's basically precious metals, and more specifically collectible silver and gold coins. I've also collected old paper money, stamps, stock certificates, rare books, and music and movie memorabilia all to a lesser degree. Keeps things interesting, and sometimes you can do pretty well with experience and a little luck.

And best of luck to you!


*Edit: Sp+fixed links, and here's my best TLDL:


Buy physical copies of some basic wealth building books. Consider :

Your Money or Your Life: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143115762

The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1533667926/

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118921283/

Read "The Richest Man in Babylon" and follow the concept of always paying yourself first:

http://www.ccsales.com/the_richest_man_in_babylon.pdf

Warren Buffett is an investing God. If/when you're ready to learn more, just start here:
http://berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

Read and/or listen to "The Science of Getting Rich":

http://scienceofgettingrich.net/subscribe.html

https://archive.org/details/TheScienceofGettingRich

Diversify a small portion of your wealth with physical assets you can hold and that might have a lifelong interest to you. A quick recommendation would be to start with 5% of your portfolio in precious metals, perhaps a small variety of silver bullion coins and bars. (I'd be happy to give you specific suggestions on these if wanted).

Rich Dad Poor Dad catches a lot of flak, but it's actually really good at teaching the absolute basics in an easy-to-follow manner. Like, learn what a Cash Flow Statement is, increase your asset column, learn basic accounting language, separate emotions and money, minimize taxes. Just glean the overall principles he's teaching and don't blindly follow his specific strategies.

The Richest Man in Babylon is another great, easy to read, investing 101 book.

And The Millionaire Next Door is a research-based book on Millionaires in America and what kind of habits and mindsets got them to their current wealth. It's a wonderfully refreshing read after being brainwashed by tv and movies saying that millionaires won it or stole it and live lavish lives. Most actual millionaires are pretty frugal and hard working with modest lives.

---
And here are some resources to help you learn all the new words and concepts:

• Investopedia
  
• Bogleheads
  
• Khan Academy
  -- Microeconomics
  -- Macroeconomics
  -- Finance
  
• Personal Finance subreddit
  
• Investing subreddit
  
• Finance subreddit
  
• Accounting subreddit
  
• Financial Independence subreddit
  
• Business subreddit
  
• Economics subreddit
  
  ---
  And when you get pretty familiar with the basics and want to start messing with stuff, I've enjoyed the Think or Swim paper money route. They give you $200,000 in fake money to play around with and invest and practice your strategies. It helps you get acquainted with the research and the interface and the fees for investing. It's a wonderful tool.
  
  And then The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is supposed to be a pretty good comprehensive guide the advanced basics (is that a term?) of investing.
  
  ---
  Or if you want to skip alllll of this and just hire someone, I've read in those subreddits that you want to find a fee based financial adviser. Which you can do here.
  
  .
  
  
  I hope I've helped man! It's a lot of fun to learn about. I wish you all the best.

Qualifications: grew up in a very modest (i.e. lower) part of town, parents worked in blue-collar professions, and started buying a rental property in the 1960's, then dad passed away (with four kids). Now definitely intergenerational wealth, all kids went to college in STEM, parents in their 90's (step-dad helped build up RE holdings to 36 units) with holdings in the 8-figures. No I haven't inherited any of it (yet) but well into middle age myself, make very good money (and will leave it at that), and have a few RE holdings.

> I'll have manager experience. I'm also reading a book called "real estate investing for dummies" and I just finished "rich Dad poor Dad"

Good for you, I didn't start reading books on anything finance related until well into my 20's, and then I read a lot of very good books. I don't think much of Kiyosaki, frankly, but as Brian Tracy said 'to earn more you must learn more'. So don't stop, keep on reading, and especially books over blog posts and short pieces. Why? Books will have more complex ideas and more research to back it up.

Regarding your game plan: you did not indicate what you are interested in doing, and what you do well, and what people will pay you to do, and what the world needs. Take a look at this ikigai graphic. Not sure if you know that welding or sales is this for you, and of course there are other things you may grow into. But hey if you have a good idea that this is the path you want to take, good for you!

I came here to say about sales, few salespeople are on Reddit, they are very busy making lots of money to talk about it. In my own (technical) sales field base runs from $65K up to $120K with another 40% commission, but you need to have the right background (STEM college degree, experience as a customer, and aptitude for outside sales) so barriers to entry are high. So yes, six figures in your late 20's is achievable, and it does take a lot of hard work, no doubt!

Of course owning your own business as a contractor, or becoming a top welder, or tons of other things you could do, I know of plenty of people who do very well.

Regarding the end goal, admirable, and I say your thinking is in the right place. The road to FI is varied - real estate is a very good method (the way my parents went, they bought low and held onto their properties in a HCOL area), investing into index funds another good method (again read books like Boglehead's Guide to Investing, or another favorite of mine on the sidebar called The Richest Man in Babylon) The amount these books can make you over five or ten years is a lot. Over 15 or 25 years is huge.

> Even if I don't get to enjoy it

I see many piling on here saying 'you should enjoy it' but I didn't interpret this comment in that way. You realize it's a road not many take (too many live way beyond their means, and don't have savings / passive income / true wealth to show for it). Yes there's sacrifice, and it takes a long time to build up $1,500 in monthly passive income much less $15,000, but people do this and often you cannot tell. (For example, look up the book The Millionaire Next Door.)

Are you on the right path? Definitely YES. The path to financial independence starts with a mindset, and the fact you are asking the question puts you out in front of all the peers of yours who are thinking about lots of other things, which you know all too well.

Will you make mistakes along the way? Of course, we are all human. The important thing is mindset, and the great thing of being younger is that you have time to make other choices, and learn along the way.

I apologise if I'm going to be direct here, but I think I can see you have the ability to come up with great insights but you're just shy of getting it right.

You establish the call to look for value bets here:

> So generally in the first round the top ranked players would play someone who is unseeded in the tournament. Even in the second round the chances of the top two or three players playing unseeded players is extremely high.

> Of course the betting lines tend to correspond to the mismatch but there are in-play betting lines which have not quite caught up with the trends.

This is good. I like the fact that you've spotted a solid bet but that you recognise that bookmakers often offer poor value on those and you need to look further afield for value. And then…

> For example if the number one seed player is playing against an un-seeded player in the first round, generally their odds will be as low as 1/40 or even 1/100. However, the odds for them to win their own service game will likely be closer to 1/12.

Oh dear. The reason why those odds are 1/12 is because the true odds are more like 1/10, and there might be no value there. You need to show that in fact the true odds are more like 1/15 by grabbing some historical data, and doing some analysis, and showing it if you can.

You then develop a system where you assume that games where the favourite serves to open the set or to win the set they are more likely to lose them, without showing any actual numbers. Why are the odds still 1/12 if the true odds change in these games? This could be a great understanding of value if you had stats to back you up.

Then this sentence:

> If you roll your bet, a $10 bet would see approximately a $30 return. So from an initial 1/40 bet, you have increased your odds to 2/1

No. No, no, no, no, no.

No.

Please, read up on Kelly criterion. If you can identify true odds, and you can identify the odds being given to you, you can identify edge/value and you can therefore identify the optimal staking plan between games that is mathematically proven to increase your bankroll optimally.

It's not a "system". It's not a guess. It is mathematic proof that given true odds and odds being offered it is trivial to work out what percentage of your bankroll you should bet.

Just rolling like this is guaranteed to kill you off almost every time.

This is a great book on the subject if you don't like the idea of reading academic papers: http://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Formula-Scientific-Betting-Casinos/dp/0809045990

And then this:

> If you are brave enough to follow this system through both rounds letting the bet roll, your $10 initial stake would grow up to as much as $2,500.

No, because you're betting 100% of the bank roll on it - you have a huge odds-on chance of losing your bank roll. This sentence suggests you have paper-traded the system but not actually done it, otherwise you would know this.

And you'd think "well, what if I bet half the bank roll? Or 75%? Or 25%?" and then suddenly you'd plot these things on a graph using historical results, and you'd spot the apex and then you would think - ah, there is a sweet spot here which increases my bank optimally.

From that you can work out through the kelly criterion your edge by rearranging the formula.

Please stop giving anecdotes, use data, show what is going on. If you don't want to give it all away to bookmakers so the edge disappears, either don't write about it, or conceal pieces of data.

>The good traders GameKyuubi was wrong about only one thing: There aren't any good traders.

If you haven't seen a good trader yet, does that mean they do not exist?

Nobody had ever seen a black swan. For thousands of years, that meant that they didn't exist. Until someone saw one, of course.

You are running into a fundamental problem of inductive logic, and it's preventing you from seeing trading rationally. If you want to read more on how this matters to traders, I'd suggest The black swan by Nassim Taleb

>There are lots of us who believe we are good traders. But we aren't. Of course, some of the loudest voices on Reddit regularly remind us about how well they time the market. Except when they don't time the market well.

Here is the first misconception about trading. The best traders have never timed the markets. They utilize arbitrage opportunities, which exist in countless forms across every asset class, and rarely have anything to do with market timing.

I highly recommend reading The Quants if you're interested in learning how successful traders operate, as well as their history. It's not only extremely informative, but highly entertaining

>A paper published last October by the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley entitled "Do Day Traders Rationally Learn About Their Ability?" used nearly 15 years of stock market day trading data to conclude that all day traders are irrational, the vast majority of day traders lose money, and even when day traders are successful, they "irrationally attribute success disproportionately to their ability rather than luck."

Now this I agree with. The vast majority of traders are terrible at trading, and when they do win, it's because they are lucky, not because they are smart. One of the fundamental books on Wallstreet for understanding this is What I learned losing a million dollars

The entire story is about an extremely successful trader who lost everything on one bet, mainly because his entire life before that had been a string of extremely lucky coincidences, and he never realized it.

>Of course, their success was due to their unique trading ability and not the fact that the entire market rose like a rocket.

Keep in mind, the best traders are always benchmarked against an asset or index. This is called beta weighing. If you make less money trading then you would have from just holding the bench marked asset, you have effectively lost money from trading.

>Warren Buffett, the most successful investor of modern times, has often said that he only invests in what he knows. His preferred holding period: forever. With that model, his company, Berkshire Hathaway, has averaged a 19 percent annual return since 1965 which means it has risen more than 1 million percent.

There are a lot of reasons for Warren Buffet's success, but it's worth pointing out that it's a lot more complex than just picking a security and holding it forever. If you want to learn about value investing, and the fundemental analysis behind it, check out Security Analysis

It's written by Ben Graham, the guy who taught Warren Buffet everything he knows. Arguably the most important concept in the text is called [investing with a margin of safety](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_safety_(financial)

Bitcoin definitely has intrinsic value. The problem is, nobody knows what that intrinsic value is worth. Since there is no currently known method of valuing a decentralized network (although progress is being made) Warren Buffet wouldn't touch bitcoin with a 10 foot pole, and if you want to invest in value, the way he has, you shouldn't either.

>Trading is no solution for intelligent people. What we need are new ways to use cryptocurrency.

Ouch man, that's harsh. I'm interested in why you correlate hodling with intelligence. IMO, there are dumb people hodling, and dumb people trading. Most of the time, it's those who form an opinion based on a single source, or worse yet a single quote, who are dumb. It's those that think in absolutes, and without a healthy degree of skepticism.

According to Ben Graham, it's not the speculators or the investors that are dumb. It's the people that can't tell the difference between the two.

EDIT: Sorry, typed this up real quick at work. Spelling and grammar mistakes everywhere.

My recommendation is that you take the plunge and get your retirement fund invested in super-low-cost ETFs with a discount brokerage like Questrade. Tangerine and eSeries are great for starting out, but you've got a considerable portfolio now and it will really benefit from optimizing costs.

Here's your breakdown with Management Expense Ratios and US Foreign Withholding Tax:

Fund|Assets|MER|US FWT

--|:--|:--|:--
Tangerine Balanced (TFSA)|$30k|1.07%|.04%
Tangerine Equity Growth (RRSP)|$38k|1.07%|.07%
TD e US equities (RRSP)|$55k|0.5%|0.22%
TD e CDN equities (RRSP)|$12K|0.33%|N/A

Weighted average MER + FWT: 0.89%
Amount paid in fees over 25 years of growth: $149,860 (assumes annual contributions of $5K and growth rate of 6%)
Value after 25 years: $698,864
Amount paid in fees over next 25 years of withdrawals: $172,287 (assumes withdrawals of $41.6K and growth rate of 4%)
Retirement income: $41,597

Now, if you were to move all your funds to Questrade and buy ETFs that track the same (or similar) indexes as you currently have:

ETF|Assets|MER|US FWT

--|:--|:--|:--
VAB: Canadian Aggregate Bond (TFSA)|$12k|.13%|N/A
VCN: FTSE Canada All Cap (TFSA)|$30.5k|.06%|N/A
VTI: US Total Stock Market (RRSP)|$73.5k|.05%|Exempt
VEA: FTSE Developed Markets (RRSP)|$18.5K|.09%|Exempt

Weighted average MER (no FWT): 0.065%
Amount paid in MER fees over 25 years: $11,931

Cost to transfer RRSP from Tangerine: $45
Cost to transfer TFSA from Tangerine: $45
Cost to transfer RRSP from TD: $75
Cost of Norbert's gambit on $92K: ~$194
Initial investment after fees: $134,641

Cost of Norbert's gambit on $3400 annually (68% of $5K contributions): ~$17/yr
Annual contribution after fees: $4890
Value after 25 years (after fees): $830,869

Cost of MER fees over next 25 years (assumes withdrawals of $54.1K and growth rate of 4%): $15,303
Cost of commissions to sell holdings in retirement annually: $40/yr
Cost of Norbert's gambit (back to CAD) on $37K (68% of retirement income): ~$84/yr
Retirement Income (drawdown over 25 years) after fees: $53,994/yr

One thing that isn't taken into account is that as you age, you'll want to shift the allocations more into bonds to protect the capital, but it won't make a huge difference to the fees and costs. What will make a difference is changes to the MER costs of each fund, but there's no way to predict that. I'm also assuming that Questrade continues to provide commission-free purchases of ETFs, and that their sell commission remains maxed at $10 (probably will go up, but who knows when or how much).

Basically, for a little extra effort, you can cut your $322K in costs down to about $27K! Let's say it takes you an extra ~5 hours of time spent learning how to use Questrade and learning about Norbert's gambit, and it takes an extra 4 hours per year to do the gambit and execute trades. Then you're spending 205 hours over 50 years to earn $295,000. That's like getting paid $1439/hr! And that's tax-free, because it's paid to you in the form of increased earnings in your TFSA and RRSP. Another way to look at it is in terms of retirement income: $41.6K/yr with your current portfolio vs $54K/yr with ETFs. What would you do with an extra $12,400 per year? A trip to Africa? A month-long Caribbean cruise?

I really don't know how much you're setting aside for retirement, $5K was just a guess. If you instead contributed $10K/year, you'd be looking at retirement income of $55.6K for the current portfolio vs $71.6K using ETFs.

So where do you start? Well, I recommend you read The Value of Simple, which you can get from Chapters, Amazon, or from the author's website. It's a great eBook that will teach you what you need to know, and guide you through the steps of DIY investing using Questrade. If you need further assistance setting up Questrade or anything else, I'd be happy to help. I went through the transition from eSeries to Questrade just a couple years ago, and am on my way to a much richer retirement!

YNAB flow chart.

First off - either in YNAB, Google Sheets, or with pen & paper - write out EVERYTHING you spend money on. Check your bank statement to help you. This
is what mine looks like.

Now, dig deeper if you haven't already . Don't just estimate how much you will spend on gifts - set a budget for those people you enjoy gifting to. What does that look like - how much are you spending? write it out! Set a budget for anyone you gift to! Here is mine.

Have Credit Card debt? Make sure to stop using those RIGHT NOW! Begin paying those off ASAP.

TIP: not sure how much your bills will cost you? OVER budget! My Electric bill is $22 a month in non summer months. but my bill come summer and the AC is on comes out to be $50-60 per month. So i budget $40 year round. This evens out. Be conservative on all your numbers.

Great! Forgetting anything? Add it when you think of it.

"Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship."

Once you have your expenses laid out - make sure you are spending less than you are making. YNAB won't help you if you don't help your self realize what your financial priority is. Is it makeup and shoes or is it Saving 6 month worth of an emergency fund & eventually a house. Be wise. Only you can help you.

Now that you know how much 1 month of living costs you and your debit is paid down or off - multiple the 1 month by 3months. Say the month costs you 3K x 3 = $9K Emergency Fund. Now you have a financial goal . /r/personalfinance can really help you determine what goal fits you best. This was just an example. I personally am trying to grow a 6 month E-fund.

Determine how quickly you can afford to meet that goal of a 3 month emergency fund. Will it take you 4 months or 12 months? How ambitious are you? Are you willing to not buy clothes for a few months? Again, this is where you have to determine YOUR goals and what track you want to be on. This has nothing to do with YNAB but read Rich Dad Poor Dad. Figure out what you want to do and want in life.

Once you have your expenses broken down into a monthly budget. Input that data into YNAB. Rent, Electric, Internet, - assign a monthly goal - why not? You know how much you need each month so assign the goal.

This is what my YNAB currently looks like. Organize yours how you see fit. I like to organize based on Priority and Due Date. It's just what works for me.

Notice "Gift Giving" This way doesn't work for everyone - some might say it's over kill but it's what works for me! It's what i need to realize my financial priority. I assign every gift a Goal by date - Generally 1 month before i plan to give the gift so i have 1 month to shop. Example i budget xmas for atleast November so i have 1 month to shop for gifts.

TIP: Don't buy anything makeup, shoes, etc impulsively. Add and Itemize everything to a Wish Farm Category . Hands down one of the best things I did. Makes you realize how many things you thought you wanted but for sure can live with out because there is other things you NEED.

If you have any questions let me know. YNAB has changed my life for the better - got me on the right track and I know you are on the right track just because you have posted on this sub but you have to commit to using YNAB DAILY!!!!! Every time you a financial transaction happens - log it! Every time you have inflow of cash (get paid) Assign every dollar to your true essentials not things that don't help you.


Don't neglect the YNAB blog - they have a bountiful amount of information on the proper way YNAB works.

tl;dr, my advice would be to take 3 deep breaths and not be in a huge rush. Don't dilly dally for no reason, but take a little while and educate yourself on what options you have. The reading list in the sidebar is a very good start. Stuff like Millionaire Teacher(new version just came out this year) will help you understand what you're investing in, why you would chose one method to invest over others, etc... Spending a few bucks on those books(or better yet, get as many as you can from a local library) will save you a heck of a lot over the course of your life.


You certainly can invest through CIBC. Either through an advisor there, or a self-directed system where you control things more directly.

But just because you have a savings account with CIBC doesn't you don't need to invest with them though! You have a few different options besides them.

An increasingly popular method is to use a roboadvisor like Wealthsimple. They charge a % of the value of your investments as their take, but they also do all the buying and selling and whatnot for you which might help keep you from doing something Silly(a lot of folks do). Silly things might include putting all your money into whatever country/sector/company has been really hot lately under the assumption that it'll keep going up forever(it probably wont!)

Or to save a bit more money you can open an account with TD and invest using their e-series mutual funds. They're quite cheap in terms of fees(for Canadian mutual funds anyway, we're used to paying through the nose for stuff like this).
Once you have that account set up you just pay your TD account number through CIBC's bill payment just like you would a phone bill or whatnot. Then once they money is in your TFSA/RRSP/Taxable account you use them to buy the appropriate funds.

Then if/when you want to really save some cash, and can be online during 'market hours' going to Questrade is a popular choice. That way you can use rock-bottom cost Exchange Traded Funds(think mutual funds, but they trade like individual stocks) and you aren't paying any significant fees to buy those.

But seriously, read a couple of those books(and make one of them Millionaire Teacher). If the how-to of investing with TD or Tangerine or Questrade is confusing to you, or you want more info on that sort of thing, The Value of Simple is a good book to get too. The e-book version gets more updates due to the realities of printing costs, but the author has a bunch of new/edited info on their website.

Finally, as to WHAT to invest in, most folks in here follow something along the lines of a Couch Potato strategy.

Your rent is really quite high, but it's Vancouver so I get it.

One thing that looks possibly missing is budgeting for longer term or infrequent regular expenses. This might be things like:

1. Saving up to buy gifts for people at Christmas. Or just saving up because you know you will spend more at restaurants around the holidays.
   
   
2. Saving up for yearly vacations.
   
   
3. Any regular bills that are yearly rather than monthly. For me this is my rental insurance, but it sounds like you have this covered. A lot of people have yearly car registration fees as well, but I think you don't own a car? Either way, make sure you budget for any expenses like this so you aren't blindsided in January when you get a large bill that you didn't plan for.
   
   
4. Clothing purchases? Maybe this is falling under "personal enjoyment" for you, but clothes wear out.. You're going to need to replace them.
   
   
5. When you get a new cellphone every 4 years or whatever, do you buy a cheaper one on contract so there is no up front cost? Otherwise, you should budget monthly savings for this. And similar regular long-term purchases (Computer?).
   
   
   Perhaps not high on your list, but if it's your thing, setting some monthly budget for charitable donations is a good idea. Alternatively, just have a budgeted "flex" category that can include this, so that you aren't off-budget for random purchases ( within reason ).
   
   Move-out expenses: I've got about a $1000 bill for IKEA furniture in the 1 bedroom place I live in now. This did not include a bed ( additional ~$800). You can certainly do this cheaper (kijiji etc.), but budgeting $2000 or so would be a comfortable start. It sounds like you have the savings to do so. You'll want a good set of cookware, cutlery, plates, and kitchen knives as well, which could set you back a couple hundred, depending on quality and sales.
   
   Retirement savings: Typical suggestion is 10-20% of your pre-tax income. Since you have a defined benefit pension, you could aim for the low end, if you expect to stay in this position long enough to get full value out of the pension. $600 / month would not be a bad starting point. At 7% yearly growth, starting from zero, this would get you to savings of 1.5 million at age 65. 4% withdrawal rate gives a retirement income of $63,000 a year which inflation adjusts to about $30,000. Disregarding the DB pension, if you include CPP of ~$7000 / year, this would give you enough in retirement to more than cover your current expenses.
   
   For your current savings, you should keep an emergency fund of about 3 - 6 months income in a regular savings account that is easy to access. This is to cover you if something unexpected happens like you lose your job, or have to take extended time off to help a family member, or have some unexpected bills. As somebody who owns neither a car nor a house, your "unexpected bills" are likely to be less frequent and smaller, so you could aim for the lower range of this. I would keep at least $20,000 for an emergency fund though.
   
   For the rest of it, you need to decide what your long term goals are. If you intend to buy a car in near future (5 years), then you should keep an appropriate amount of money in a savings account, or other guaranteed instruments (such as GICs). GICs often (sometimes?) pay more interest than savings accounts, but have specific maturity dates. If you pull the money out before then, you forfeit all / some of the interest (depending on the terms of the particular GIC). If you think you will buy a car in 3 years, don't buy a GIC with a 5 year maturity date. If you intend to buy a house in the future, basically the same story. Keep the appropriate down-payment savings in a savings account or GIC so that there is no chance of losing it before you need it. Stock market investments are great in the long term, but for short term savings there is too much fluctuation, and you could be underwater when you need the money.
   
   If a car, house, or other large purchase (Planned big vacation, wedding, etc?) is not coming in the near future, then you should invest the rest for retirement. I recommend you pick up the book "A random walk down wall street" for more information about how you should be investing for retirement. The short version is to get a low-fee online brokerage account (I use TD direct investing), buy ETF index funds, and just hold them. No day-trading or "I think this will go down tomorrow, I'm going to sell and buy it back then!".
   
   

Well, you're already many steps ahead of most people twice your age if you can see this already. :)

What I did was the 9 to 5 (...er 6 to 10 sometimes) for ~5 years to see how businesses work and gain skills. Now that I've gained that knowledge, I'm taking what I never could have learned on my own without that experience and starting my own company doing similar work as a consultant but where I can make sure to always hold true to my values, not work 6 to 10, and live more simply. That's my hope anyway, wish me luck! Just wanted to say if you do end up working a 9 to 5, it can be temporary.

The advice other have given for r/financialindependence and r/leanfire subs are great. Also, don't take out loans for more $ than you actually have if possible, and save your money in something like mutual funds so inflation doesn't eat up your savings like it would sitting under your mattress. Lastly, I highly recommend this book, see if your library has it for free.

Best of luck, please know that all of life is a journey. You feel confused now, but don't expect to ever 'have it all figured out'. You'll continue to learn, adjust, and grow through your 30s and, presumably, beyond.

\> This is not a financial problem, this is a trauma problem.

Perfectly said.

OP, in therapy you can talk about your experiences growing up with financial worries. A good therapist can help you explore how those experiences affected you and help you identify the narratives you tell yourself as a result.

It sounds like the financial hyper-awareness has actually served a very useful purpose for you so far. You did well in school and worked your way into a good career. But there's a saying: "What got you here won't get you there." Now your anxiety around finances is holding you back, and you would be better served by spending less energy worrying about finances while still putting a plan in place to responsibly manage your finances.

A therapist can also help you retrain your thinking. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one type of therapy which is aimed at retraining negative automatic thoughts. You identify negative thoughts and write them down, then apply techniques from the CBT toolbox to understand why those thoughts are distorted and replace them with more adaptive thoughts that better reflect reality.

The key point is that your brain won't let you simply choose to stop thinking a negative thought, because there's usually a kernel of truth. You need to replace the negative thought with a new thought that also true but is more adaptive.

So for example, when you think:

\> I'm suddenly gonna lose all my money at the blink of an eye

You can write that thought down, then look at a list of cognitive distortions and identify things like "all or nothing thinking" and "jumping to conclusions". From there you can identify potentially useful CBT techniques. Some techniques work better for certain types of cognitive distortions. So you might try techniques like exploring "What's the worst that would happen? How would I need to react if I actually lost all my money?", or you might try keeping count of unwanted thoughts to make yourself better at noticing them as they appear. There are dozens of techniques.

I'll note that studies have actually shown that CBT from a book can be just as effective as CBT with a therapist. I'd recommend finding a therapist if you're able, because they can help in ways that a book can't. But it's worth mentioning for anyone who isn't able to see a therapist, or isn't sure whether their therapist is any good.

You can just open up the book, start reading, and do the exercises. The key is that you can't just skim the book. You have to actually do the work and write down your answers.

Here's a good book on CBT:

https://www.amazon.com/When-Panic-Attacks-Drug-Free-Anxiety/dp/076792083X

Here is a good blog post on how to find a therapist:

https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2016/04/17/howto-therapy-what-psychotherapy-is-how-to-find-a-therapist-and-when-to-fire-your-therapist/

Finally, one way to feel more in control is to learn more about managing your finances. I'd recommend reading a good book on personal finance, like this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing-Taylor-Larimore/dp/1118921283

And then I'd recommend writing out an "investing policy statement". Basically it's a written statement describing your financial goals and long term plan of how to attain them. You're effectively writing instructions for your future self. This can help put worrying to rest. For example, you can consult the statement to remind yourself that you planned to save $___/month toward a house and $___/month toward retirement. If you are meeting your goals, you shouldn't feel guilty about spending money on things you enjoy.

Here's a blog post describing an investing policy statement:

https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/how-to-write-an-investing-personal-statement/

Disclaimer: I'm mid20s guy with less invested in shares than I have in my super. The following is what I did to get started in investing which sounds like you're about where I was a year or two ago.

First of all; depending on your circumstances be aware that ING Direct's or ME Bank's savings accounts are currently giving 3.00% interest which might be better than your term deposit if you don't want to go whole hog into shares right away. (ING Direct also does $50 bonus referral codes so expect a flood of PMs now that I've mentioned this)

-----
As for books:
/r/FI's wiki makes some good recommendations from what I've read of them

>Investing

>* The Bogleheads Guide to Investing

• A Random Walk Down Wallstreet
  
• The Four Pillars of Investing
  
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns
  
• Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School -- Suggestion - Ignore Rule 9 regarding individual stock picking.
  
• The Intelligent Investor -- Caution - Embark on individual stock ownership at your own risk.
  
  The lowest barrier to entry would be that "acorns" app but I strongly recommend taking the couple days to make a CMC account or some other online brokerage with low fees and buy ETFS through that instead so that you're actually learning how it all works and not just pressing buttons on an app. Link it up with free Sharesight account for pretty graphs and easy tax reporting and that should teach you more about "having a share portfolio" than the majority of the population.
  
  Obviously this subreddit and /r/fiaustralia in the sidebar are worth keeping an eye on for insight from people with more skin in the game than me.
  
  -------------------
  
  Now, the other option is you want to ACTIVELY trade that $1k. If you've read some of Bogle's explanations on why that's a bad idea, realised you'll be competing against people with much bigger budgets and a full time job anaysing these things and understand that even at CMC's low $13 flat fee you're losing 1.3% of your $1k packet with every trade then you'll need advice from someone other than me.
  
  Personally the best investment I think I have made so far was my $1k of "beer money" that I threw into bitcoin. Not because it made a good return, but because after months of careful analysis, frequent trading and keeping an ear to the ground on new alt coins I turned my 3.5 bitcoin into 1.05. I didn't end up losing a cent thanks to other factors but seeing how badly my "high risk, high gain, actively managed portfolio" went I'm ecstatic that I learned my lesson with $1k and not with my self-managed super fund at 57 y/o like several people I know.
  
  TL;DR: Anything by John Bogle

Page 2 of 3
Now, I am not going to give you specific tips on investing in financial markets. It’s like telling a 6-year-old; “I see you learned to ride a bike, let’s go see what you can do in an Apache Helicopter.” It might be fun to watch but it really is not a good plan and anything the kid may learn would be lost on him as it crashes to the ground.

You heard the familiar adage about “Give a man fish, you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish…..yadda yadda” Instead I will list a few resources that will make your journey an educational, well informed and hopefully, very profitable one:

Step 1: (estimated time to master:2-3 days of intense reading)

First get an entry level book… you know the type, it breaks stuff down so simply, it is almost insulting…yea that type! Check your library, as although these books are fantastic for the very low level learning, once you master it, you might not refer back to this one too often,
Something like this (not a shill for any author or publisher):
https://www.amazon.com/Personal-Finance-Dummies-Eric-Tyson/dp/1118117859

Sure, it may be a bit dry and parts will seem numbingly simple but I guarantee you will learn a few new things, enhance your understanding of things you already know and begin building the most solid foundation you can. Like most things in life, the foundation will determine if your future efforts are sound or just primed for unforeseen disaster.

Step 1a: (estimated time to master:1-2 hours to learn, years of pounding it into your head)

Be able to define and clearly understand the concept of “Compound interest/growth.” I cringe at the number of people who fail to fully grasp this concept and the impact it can have your life and on the value of your portfolio. Study this concept like your life depends on it. Embrace it, love it, make it your bitch. This is the one and true monolith that stands taller than all others when it comes to taking a proper long term view of your investments. It is Wonka’s Golden Ticket. Once you think you are a Comp-Int ninja, learn it some more. Never lose sight of the goal and the primary mechanism that is going to get you to the promised land. Oh, and just to make sure you are beating this concept into your head, learn the meaning of “temporal dissonance” and how it relates to so many others failing to properly reach their goals. 30 years from now, you will thank me.

Step 2. (estimated time to master:1-2 weeks with additional web research to clarify questions and concepts)

Get another book or ten. One is good to start and should be directed more towards understanding actual beginner investment in stock markets.

https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-Investing-Money-Smart/dp/1477463992/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1477463992&pd_rd_r=M1PDAGCEZ704BBNQ6JDR&pd_rd_w=1YX5U&pd_rd_wg=dLc5n&psc=1&refRID=M1PDAGCEZ704BBNQ6JDR

or

https://www.amazon.com/Investing-Online-Dummies-Matt-Krantz/dp/1119228352/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1484793761&sr=1-3&keywords=online+stock+trading+for+dummies

or

https://www.amazon.com/Stock-Investing-Dummies-Paul-Mladjenovic/dp/1119239281/ref=pd_sim_14_6?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1119239281&pd_rd_r=BZHS9CJZZWBRA86WN3MP&pd_rd_w=WSFFO&pd_rd_wg=rGrkD&psc=1&refRID=BZHS9CJZZWBRA86WN3MP
or find one YOU like…I am not a damn librarian.

When you are finished with this step you should be rather comfortable with most basic stock investing terms. Words like Equity, ETF, Mutual Funds, Preferred stock, Long, short will become part of your conversations at happy hour, chicks will dig you and guys will want to be like you. (I’m sorry, I just assumed your gender and orientation, please reverse that last phrase if it better suits your lifestyle). You will dream of S&P gains and have nightmares about the words: bear, correction and SEC investigation. In other words, you are now shaping up as a solid investor with years of prosperity in front of you. Alas, you are not there yet grasshopper…

(continued)

Read. All the famous investors started reading at a young age and read ferociously (ok maybe not all but most).

Go to the library if you can, they generally will have all the quality investing tomes, without some of the "get rich quick manuals" which only benefit the authors.

Here is a few books to start with:

• The Four Pillars of Investing
  
• The Intelligent Investor
  
• The Bogleheads Guide to Investing You could start here. Pretty good introduction.
  
• A Random Walk Down Wall Street
  
• The Richest Man in Babylon (PDF) This is a quick read, and more a story than anything. Still worth it.
  
• [The Little Book of Common Sense Investing] (http://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense-Investing/dp/0470102101/ref=pd_sim_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=16QN03Q9GFZ6NG5PPJ6P)
  
  Most of this stuff is investment theory. To be a successful investor as an average American, without a job in the finance industry, you probably don't have to read all of those books. If you really want to get into investing, that's a good place to start.
  
  Also, the Bogleheads book is a great one to start with because you can decide if you really are interested in investing. If not, that book is good personal financial advice regardless who you're getting paid. It will benefit the regular American.
  

You're still being quite general, but I'll answer the best I can.

To be honest, as a trader I mainly traded OTC (Over-The-Counter) interest rate products that are not available to trade for retail investors, so you learn most of it on the job, other than pricing and valuing the products themselves, which appears on textbooks, but nothing that can be of much use for a retail investor.

Each financial product is different, so although there are some "transferable" skills, it truly depends on what you are trading, but again, trading is very short-termist so I wouldn't recommend it to a retail investor in spite of all those guru books that sell you that you can be a successful day trader, you can't: you'll just bleed losses, bid-ask spreads, brokerage fees and short-term taxes, plus again there is no way you'll beat full-time pros.

In terms of learning Economics and Finance, I'm afraid I'm of little help because I learned it all during my degree and masters at a very in-depth, specialised level, purely through textbooks. Also, a lot of it is very theoretical and not sure if of much use for an amateur level, or for real life, for that matter.

I did watch quite recently a video by billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, which explains quite well and succintly how the economy works. For those readers that don't speak English very well, if you go into Bridgewater's youtube account, you can find the video in different languages.

If what you refer to is equity investing, but not anything related to the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), I quite sympathise with the value investing approach. In that sense, books I'd recommend are:

• The Snowball by Alice Schroder
  
  
• The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
  
  
• Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd
  
  
• The Most Important Thing Illuminated: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor by Howard Marks
  
  Oh, and you'll have to learn public company accounting and valuation inside out, as well as get used to reading annual and quarterly company accounts (amongst other things) on a regular basis.
  
  The info sidebar of /r/SecurityAnalysis is probably a good starting point.
  
  Anyhow, the real and only way to learn about investing is to get down to it and put some money on the line. Books will only get you so far.

>The purpose of this post is help new investors. Often times we may be asked by a friend or family member what they should invest in. They can be easily turned off by throwing multiple FAQs and guides at them. I have found that for a new investor, reading through wikipedia pages on lazy or 3-fund portfolios can be daunting. Reading books on the subject can be over the head of most people as well, if they do not have a finance background. Understanding stocks and bonds as well as the overall market is difficult so don't feel bad about not understanding it. I will try to keep this as short and sweet as possible. Hopefully you can link friends or family who are just starting off with investing to this post to set them on the right path. This information is covered in the FAQ very briefly without much explanation, however. Hopefully others can add insights that could be helpful for readers of this guide or additional questions to add on if they come up.
>
>Disclosure: I am not a financial adviser. I do not work in the financial sector. I do invest in some of the funds that may be listed in this guide. I did not author/publish any recommended books in this guide. I am also not a CPA. This guide is not intended to discuss tax planning.
>
>#Why should I invest?
>
>You should invest in order to help your money grow. Without growth from investing, it would be impossible for most people to retire. 401ks, IRAs, Pensions, and even Social Security all rely on investment returns to meet their obligations.
>
>#Isn't investing risky? How can I be sure I'm not going to lose everything?
>
>Investing doesn't have to be very risky. If you are investing in a single stock and that company goes out of business, then you can lose a lot of money. This is why diversification is important. It like the saying goes, "never put all your eggs in one basket." If they basket breaks then all your eggs break. If you invest in thousands of companies or put your eggs in thousands of baskets then you are much less likely to lose your investment and are quite more likely to gain money. For example, since it was started in 1994 the LifeStrategy growth fund listed below has grown 8% on average per year and invests in thousands of stocks and bonds, international and domestic.
>
>You may think that a 1% high yield savings account is a "safe investment." However, if inflation is over 1% per year, which it often is, it means that you are actually losing purchasing power on that money in the savings account.
>
>Even if you started investing right before a major financial crisis, you would still have more money than a very high yield savings account: Chart
>
>#I Know absolutely nothing about investing, what stocks should I buy?
>
>Target Date Fund or Lifestyle Fund. These are ALL-IN-ONE solutions for investing.
>
>Step 1: Open an account with Vanguard if you don't already have one.
>
>CLICK HERE to determine a good Target date fund for you. How a target date fund works is that it starts off with a higher percentage of stocks to bonds such as 90/10 and then moves toward 50/50 as you near the target date.
>
>For Lifestyle Funds:
>
>the Vanguard LifeStrategy Growth Fund is a solid choice that gives you an 80/20 stock to bond ratio.
>
>the Vanguard LifeStrategy Moderate Growth Fund is also a good choice for a 60/40 stock to bond ration.
>
>Vanguard can make a personalized recommendation for you as well if you aren't sure
>
>in general the higher amount of bonds you have, the less risk but lower growth potential your investment will have.
>
>#Shouldn't I listen to a financial adviser instead of some stranger on reddit?
>
>Well That depends on a few things:
>
>How much money is this financial adviser gaining from your business? I am gaining zero, so I have no reason to steer you wrong. Some times a financial adviser is out to make significant commissions by landing business, especially in extremely high fee "investments" such as whole life insurance or similar policies. Even 1% fees to hold and manage your investments can take a huge bite out of your account over time.
>
>Fee based advisers are the kind that you pay for an appointment, much like a doctor visit, and then they give you advice on your investments. Try to make sure however that they do not try to advise you into using investment vehicles that they receive commission from. These can be helpful in certain situations because you aren't throwing away money for years and years just to have an adviser handle your money.
>
>Consumer Reports says this could happen with some financial advisers. Basically they use their positions and your lack of knowledge to get you to invest in things to make them more money, costing you dearly in the long term.
>
>#Why are you suggesting Vanguard? What about other banks / brokerages?
>
>I find Vanguard the easiest to use. They also are structured to keep your investments safe. Once you reach a $50,000 with them, you have access to professional advisers. Unlike other banks/brokerages the advisers at Vanguard DO NOT RECEIVE COMMISSIONS. They are salaried so they have no reason to steer you wrong. Source
>
>Vanguard also has some of (if not the) lowest fees in the industry. This saves you money in the long term vs using other institutions or a financial adviser to manage your money.
>
>#Are there other investments besides these All-in-one funds?
>
>Yes, of course. Here are some more examples of portfolios that you could use as well:
>
> Examples of so called "Lazy Portfolios"
>
> These are some 3 fund portfolios
>
>
>#Are there any good books I could read to understand these investments more?
>
>Book recommendations:
>
> The Bogleheads Guide to Investing
>
> The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need: The Way Smart Money Invests Today
>
> Book List from Bogleheads wiki
>
>

>The purpose of this post is help new investors. Often times we may be asked by a friend or family member what they should invest in. They can be easily turned off by throwing multiple FAQs and guides at them. I have found that for a new investor, reading through wikipedia pages on lazy or 3-fund portfolios can be daunting. Reading books on the subject can be over the head of most people as well, if they do not have a finance background. Understanding stocks and bonds as well as the overall market is difficult so don't feel bad about not understanding it. I will try to keep this as short and sweet as possible. Hopefully you can link friends or family who are just starting off with investing to this post to set them on the right path. This information is covered in the FAQ very briefly without much explanation, however. Hopefully others can add insights that could be helpful for readers of this guide or additional questions to add on if they come up.
>
>Disclosure: I am not a financial adviser. I do not work in the financial sector. I do invest in some of the funds that may be listed in this guide. I did not author/publish any recommended books in this guide. I am also not a CPA. This guide is not intended to discuss tax planning.
>
>#Why should I invest?
>
>You should invest in order to help your money grow. Without growth from investing, it would be impossible for most people to retire. 401ks, IRAs, Pensions, and even Social Security all rely on investment returns to meet their obligations.
>
>#Isn't investing risky? How can I be sure I'm not going to lose everything?
>
>Investing doesn't have to be very risky. If you are investing in a single stock and that company goes out of business, then you can lose a lot of money. This is why diversification is important. It like the saying goes, "never put all your eggs in one basket." If they basket breaks then all your eggs break. If you invest in thousands of companies or put your eggs in thousands of baskets then you are much less likely to lose your investment and are quite more likely to gain money. For example, since it was started in 1994 the LifeStrategy growth fund listed below has grown 8% on average per year and invests in thousands of stocks and bonds, international and domestic.
>
>You may think that a 1% high yield savings account is a "safe investment." However, if inflation is over 1% per year, which it often is, it means that you are actually losing purchasing power on that money in the savings account.
>
>Even if you started investing right before a major financial crisis, you would still have more money than a very high yield savings account: Chart
>
>#I Know absolutely nothing about investing, what stocks should I buy?
>
>Target Date Fund or Lifestyle Fund. These are ALL-IN-ONE solutions for investing.
>
>Step 1: Open an account with Vanguard if you don't already have one.
>
>CLICK HERE to determine a good Target date fund for you. How a target date fund works is that it starts off with a higher percentage of stocks to bonds such as 90/10 and then moves toward 50/50 as you near the target date.
>
>For Lifestyle Funds:
>
>the Vanguard LifeStrategy Growth Fund is a solid choice that gives you an 80/20 stock to bond ratio.
>
>the Vanguard LifeStrategy Moderate Growth Fund is also a good choice for a 60/40 stock to bond ration.
>
>Vanguard can make a personalized recommendation for you as well if you aren't sure
>
>in general the higher amount of bonds you have, the less risk but lower growth potential your investment will have.
>
>#Shouldn't I listen to a financial adviser instead of some stranger on reddit?
>
>Well That depends on a few things:
>
>How much money is this financial adviser gaining from your business? I am gaining zero, so I have no reason to steer you wrong. Some times a financial adviser is out to make significant commissions by landing business, especially in extremely high fee "investments" such as whole life insurance or similar policies. Even 1% fees to hold and manage your investments can take a huge bite out of your account over time.
>
>Fee based advisers are the kind that you pay for an appointment, much like a doctor visit, and then they give you advice on your investments. Try to make sure however that they do not try to advise you into using investment vehicles that they receive commission from. These can be helpful in certain situations because you aren't throwing away money for years and years just to have an adviser handle your money.
>
>Consumer Reports says this could happen with some financial advisers. Basically they use their positions and your lack of knowledge to get you to invest in things to make them more money, costing you dearly in the long term.
>
>#Why are you suggesting Vanguard? What about other banks / brokerages?
>
>I find Vanguard the easiest to use. They also are structured to keep your investments safe. Once you reach a $50,000 with them, you have access to professional advisers. Unlike other banks/brokerages the advisers at Vanguard DO NOT RECEIVE COMMISSIONS. They are salaried so they have no reason to steer you wrong. Source
>
>Vanguard also has some of (if not the) lowest fees in the industry. This saves you money in the long term vs using other institutions or a financial adviser to manage your money.
>
>#Are there other investments besides these All-in-one funds?
>
>Yes, of course. Here are some more examples of portfolios that you could use as well:
>
> Examples of so called "Lazy Portfolios"
>
> These are some 3 fund portfolios
>
>
>#Are there any good books I could read to understand these investments more?
>
>Book recommendations:
>
> The Bogleheads Guide to Investing
>
> The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need: The Way Smart Money Invests Today
>
> Book List from Bogleheads wiki
>
>

>The purpose of this post is help new investors. Often times we may be asked by a friend or family member what they should invest in. They can be easily turned off by throwing multiple FAQs and guides at them. I have found that for a new investor, reading through wikipedia pages on lazy or 3-fund portfolios can be daunting. Reading books on the subject can be over the head of most people as well, if they do not have a finance background. Understanding stocks and bonds as well as the overall market is difficult so don't feel bad about not understanding it. I will try to keep this as short and sweet as possible. Hopefully you can link friends or family who are just starting off with investing to this post to set them on the right path. This information is covered in the FAQ very briefly without much explanation, however. Hopefully others can add insights that could be helpful for readers of this guide or additional questions to add on if they come up.
>
>Disclosure: I am not a financial adviser. I do not work in the financial sector. I do invest in some of the funds that may be listed in this guide. I did not author/publish any recommended books in this guide. I am also not a CPA. This guide is not intended to discuss tax planning.
>
>#Why should I invest?
>
>You should invest in order to help your money grow. Without growth from investing, it would be impossible for most people to retire. 401ks, IRAs, Pensions, and even Social Security all rely on investment returns to meet their obligations.
>
>#Isn't investing risky? How can I be sure I'm not going to lose everything?
>
>Investing doesn't have to be very risky. If you are investing in a single stock and that company goes out of business, then you can lose a lot of money. This is why diversification is important. It like the saying goes, "never put all your eggs in one basket." If they basket breaks then all your eggs break. If you invest in thousands of companies or put your eggs in thousands of baskets then you are much less likely to lose your investment and are quite more likely to gain money. For example, since it was started in 1994 the LifeStrategy growth fund listed below has grown 8% on average per year and invests in thousands of stocks and bonds, international and domestic.
>
>You may think that a 1% high yield savings account is a "safe investment." However, if inflation is over 1% per year, which it often is, it means that you are actually losing purchasing power on that money in the savings account.
>
>Even if you started investing right before a major financial crisis, you would still have more money than a very high yield savings account: Chart
>
>#I Know absolutely nothing about investing, what stocks should I buy?
>
>Target Date Fund or Lifestyle Fund. These are ALL-IN-ONE solutions for investing.
>
>Step 1: Open an account with Vanguard if you don't already have one.
>
>CLICK HERE to determine a good Target date fund for you. How a target date fund works is that it starts off with a higher percentage of stocks to bonds such as 90/10 and then moves toward 50/50 as you near the target date.
>
>For Lifestyle Funds:
>
>the Vanguard LifeStrategy Growth Fund is a solid choice that gives you an 80/20 stock to bond ratio.
>
>the Vanguard LifeStrategy Moderate Growth Fund is also a good choice for a 60/40 stock to bond ration.
>
>Vanguard can make a personalized recommendation for you as well if you aren't sure
>
>in general the higher amount of bonds you have, the less risk but lower growth potential your investment will have.
>
>#Shouldn't I listen to a financial adviser instead of some stranger on reddit?
>
>Well That depends on a few things:
>
>How much money is this financial adviser gaining from your business? I am gaining zero, so I have no reason to steer you wrong. Some times a financial adviser is out to make significant commissions by landing business, especially in extremely high fee "investments" such as whole life insurance or similar policies. Even 1% fees to hold and manage your investments can take a huge bite out of your account over time.
>
>Fee based advisers are the kind that you pay for an appointment, much like a doctor visit, and then they give you advice on your investments. Try to make sure however that they do not try to advise you into using investment vehicles that they receive commission from. These can be helpful in certain situations because you aren't throwing away money for years and years just to have an adviser handle your money.
>
>Consumer Reports says this could happen with some financial advisers. Basically they use their positions and your lack of knowledge to get you to invest in things to make them more money, costing you dearly in the long term.
>
>#Why are you suggesting Vanguard? What about other banks / brokerages?
>
>I find Vanguard the easiest to use. They also are structured to keep your investments safe. Once you reach a $50,000 with them, you have access to professional advisers. Unlike other banks/brokerages the advisers at Vanguard DO NOT RECEIVE COMMISSIONS. They are salaried so they have no reason to steer you wrong. Source
>
>Vanguard also has some of (if not the) lowest fees in the industry. This saves you money in the long term vs using other institutions or a financial adviser to manage your money.
>
>#Are there other investments besides these All-in-one funds?
>
>Yes, of course. Here are some more examples of portfolios that you could use as well:
>
> Examples of so called "Lazy Portfolios"
>
> These are some 3 fund portfolios
>
>
>#Are there any good books I could read to understand these investments more?
>
>Book recommendations:
>
> The Bogleheads Guide to Investing
>
> The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need: The Way Smart Money Invests Today
>
> Book List from Bogleheads wiki
>
>

It's very risky out there right now, and a lot of the pros have significant holdings in cash. Source. Maybe buying a CD or just keeping it in a checking account is the best thing to do.

As for paying for college with your $1000, that's probably unlikely. If you earn 10% a year on your money, which would be extremely good, in 10 years you would have $2,593.74 before taxes. The first rule of investing is to be realistic in your expectations, or else you're going to lose all your money on some very risky ventures.

What you probably want to do is play the market. You'll research companies, but the right stocks, and see them increase rapidly while all the other suckers are left behind. If you really want to try that, read The Intelligent Investor and use EDGAR to do your research. The problem with this is that every time you buy a stock, you have to pay broker's fees, and $1000 will get burned through pretty quickly. Also, no offense, but the odds that you're smarter, or luckier, than every other trader out there and are going to beat the market is pretty slim. Your assembled portfolio before broker fees will probably underperform the general market. After broker fees it will be a rout.

The problem with that style of investing is unsystematic risk. In short, you buy stock in something like Lehman Brothers or GM, you get wiped out. To avoid both broker fees and unsystematic risk, you want want to follow the strategy in A Random Walk Down Wall Street. The idea under that strategy is that you buy a fund that tracks the market. You'll never gain more than the market gains, but you'll also never lose more than the market loses. You have to give up your (unrealistic) dreams of achieving untold riches, but in exchange you get a steady paycheck.

Vanguard is arguably the best company for retail investors. One of these target funds would probably suit your needs best, as they are diversified stock and bond funds designed to track the market, minimize fees, and maximize reward for the amount of risk assumed. (This is known as the Sharpe Ratio as part of the Capital Asset Pricing Model)

If you're just determined to speculate, Vanguard also has some stock mutual funds and some sector specific ETF's, so you can assume systematic risk in the hope that it pays off. You can find the asset funds here and the ETFs here.

TL;DR: If I were you, I would just hold cash, as $1,000 isn't that much. Just use it to pay a laptop for school.

But if you're determined to invest it in the market, read a Random Walk and buy a diversified passively managed fund.

If you're just determined to speculate in unsystematic risk, get a fund through Vanguard. If that isn't enough, read The Intelligent Investor and best of luck to you, because $1,000 is a lot of money to lose for something that can be summarized on a Saturday morning in about ten minutes.

But you're most likely better off with growth stocks than reinvesting dividends. High-dividend stocks, in general, are established companies with steady earnings. Their stock prices don't move all that much, or at least don't match/beat the market. Of course there are exceptions, but for the most part you're choosing between huge growth potential and huge dividends. Imagine if you'd bought Google (no dividend) 5 years ago versus AT&T (huge dividend). You'd be way better off with Google, regardless of reinvesting that almost 6% dividend.

You really, really should look at index funds/ETFs. You'll get a nice mix of high-dividend stocks and stocks with high growth potential.

Think about it this way: You're young and just starting. This is the best time to be making good investment decisions, because right now is when your money has the most time to grow. If you make dumb decisions now then get smart when you're 35, you've lost 10 years of time. So you want to make the best possible decision now. Don't let youthful confidence make you think you know better than the tried-and-true advise. If investing in high-dividend stocks when you were young was the smartest strategy, that would be the tried-and-true advice... but it isn't. A three-fund portfolio of indexes is.

You're clearly doing the right thing starting young and seeking out advice. I'd suggest spending $15 and a day of time reading Bogelhead's Guide to Investing. It covers all the basics about what to look for, and explains why a three-fund portfolio is smart... so you can know for yourself instead of taking random internet advice. Pretty small investment of time/money to set yourself out on the right foot when it matters the most.

> 1. what are your recommendations for budgets for beginners? The ones on the wiki are slightly confusing to me

The main thing is to spend less than you earn. Certain exceptions for mortgages or college can be okay, but understand what you’re getting yourself into. If you feel like a more detailed budget with specific allotments for food/transportation/etc helps you, that’s fine, but spending less than you earn is the important part.

> 2. Any books/videos I should read/watch to get a good idea? I've watched a couple of people like Graham Stephan but that's about it

The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins. He wrote this book for his own daughter when she was starting her adult life. It covers the basics of investing, 401k’s, all that stuff, but also higher level concepts like why you should even care about personal finance at all.

> 3. I'm looking to open up an online bank account, credit card, and ROTH IRA soon and would appreciate which cards/index funds to go for vs which ones to avoid (I will be in the States)

Online bank account - whichever one offers the best combination of a high interest rate and convenience (ATM’s in your area, etc). Just google around.

Credit card - Given that you’re young without a credit history, the best credit card will probably be any card you can get, preferably one without an annual fee. Every credit card has a high interest rate, so be careful with it and pay your balance in full every month. If you pay the full balance then you won’t pay the high interest rate (or any interest). If you mess up and pay late or don’t pay at all you’ll damage your credit score and hurt yourself down the road (mortgages or other loans will be harder to get, and more expensive if you can get them at all).

Roth IRA - You can only contribute to this if you have earned income from a job, and cannot contribute more than you earn in a year. Assuming you have earned income, open a Roth IRA with Vanguard and invest it in VTSAX, which is a mutual fund containing small parts of the top 3000 company stocks in the US. You need at least 1k to start. You can contribute automatically every month or every pay day if you want. And the maximum allowed is 6k/year.

Entrepreneur Reading List

1. Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
   
2. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
   
3. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
   
4. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
   
5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
   
6. Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
   
7. Ikigai
   
8. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition
   
9. Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch
   
10. The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
    
11. Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web
    
12. The Web Startup Success Guide
    
13. The Best of Guerrilla Marketing: Guerrilla Marketing Remix
    
14. From Program to Product: Turning Your Code into a Saleable Product
    
15. This Little Program Went to Market: Create, Deploy, Distribute, Market, and Sell Software and More on the Internet at Little or No Cost to You
    
16. The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
    
17. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
    
18. Startups Open Sourced: Stories to Inspire and Educate
    
19. In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters
    
20. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
    
21. Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
    
22. Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
    
23. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
    
24. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
    
25. Eric Sink on the Business of Software
    
26. Words that Sell: More than 6000 Entries to Help You Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas
    
27. Anything You Want
    
28. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
    
29. The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
    
30. Tao Te Ching
    
31. Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
    
32. The Tao of Programming
    
33. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
    
34. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
    
    

    Computer Science Grad School Reading List
    

    
    

35. All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School
    
36. Introductory Linear Algebra: An Applied First Course
    
37. Introduction to Probability
    
38. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    
39. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society
    
40. Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
    
41. What Is This Thing Called Science?
    
42. The Art of Computer Programming
    
43. The Little Schemer
    
44. The Seasoned Schemer
    
45. Data Structures Using C and C++
    
46. Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
    
47. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
    
48. Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
    
49. How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing
    
50. A Science of Operations: Machines, Logic and the Invention of Programming
    
51. Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology
    
52. The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
    
53. The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
    
54. Computability: An Introduction to Recursive Function Theory
    
55. How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
    
56. Types and Programming Languages
    
57. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Elementary Algorithms
    
58. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Mathematical Methods
    
59. Commonsense Reasoning
    
60. Using Language
    
61. Computer Vision
    
62. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
    
63. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    
    

    Video Game Development Reading List
    

    
    

64. Game Programming Gems - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
    
65. AI Game Programming Wisdom - 1 2 3 4
    
66. Making Games with Python and Pygame
    
67. Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python
    
68. Bit by Bit

If you don't want to make a career out of trading, a helpful rule of thumb is a 90 / 10 principle popularized by Andrew Hallam in his text Millionaire Teacher: Stick 90% of your capital in tax sheltered, virtually passive forms of investment like index mutual funds or ETFs with an IRA wrapper and stick the other 10% in whatever investment vehicle you want to learn.

For example, I put 90% of my capital in a batch of index funds and ETFs predicated on John Bogle's suggestion of "your age in bonds, the rest in common stock" index funds and ETFs by way of an account with Vanguard for my IRA and my company's 403(b) program. Vanguard makes this really easy through their target retirement funds, which automatically adjust the ratio of stock / bonds over time. I'm really interested in value investing; so, I take long positions in individual stock that meets the criteria Benjamin Graham identified in Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor with the other 10% of my capital via a brokerage account with TD Ameritrade--this isn't tax sheltered like my retirement accounts but it's basically an ongoing education in investing since TD Ameritrade offers a ton of instructional materials on topics like options, commodities, etc. and I want to see my money grow.

Let's take a look at what this could look like for your situation. Starting with $5k and doing something like what I'm doing, you would:

1. Open an account with Vanguard or whomever else you want to deal with for your IRA and invest $4500 there. If you follow that same rule of thumb I mentioned from Bogle, you could stick 18% of that in a bond ETF like BND, i.e. $810. Of course, you'll have to purchase in units equivalent to the going rate of the ETF shares, which $83.22 at present. So, you'd have to go with 10 shares for a total of $832.20 invested. Then, you could stick the rest in a total stock market ETF like VTI, whose going rate is $103.50 at present. To invest 82% of your available $4500, or $3690, you would need to buy 35 shares for a total of $3685.50 invested. But maybe all this seems way too complex to keep track of year after year; so, you could instead just invest all $4500 in a one-stop-shop composite index fund like Vanguard's Target Retirement 2035, which currently features a ratio pretty close to what you want between bonds and stock and will automatically adjust for you over time.
   
   
2. Open an account with pretty much any other decent brokerage, study up, and invest your remaining cash in whatever you want to learn how to do. $500 is not going to buy you much stock, but you could pull off a few options plays with that amount of cash. The key here is to provide a context where you basically force yourself to learn how to invest by having an actual stake in the game. A lot of people advocate paper trading, i.e. executing trades with fake money but real stock market numbers, as a way to learn how to invest; however, we all behave differently when our actual money is at stake. It's better to learn with actual money, even if it's not much. As I mentioned before, I personally like TD Ameritrade because they provide a lot of instructional content; however, your mileage may vary.
   
   Any follow up questions?

It seems you're confusing your critique of Marx's theories with the idea that he wasn't the first to articulate those ideas as well as he has. Just so you know, the idea that Marx's theories were just a rearticulation of what a bunch of people had thought through time immemorial is false. In fact, the kind of capital-as-powersource Marx was talking about didn't really come into it's own before that time period. Before that, major power sources were armies or feudal alliances or churches, not the business class.

Regardless of how you feel about what he said, he was one of the first (if not the first) person who can really be shown to have said it.

> Indeed, the early criticism of Marx surrounded his fathomless ignorance of the landowning peasantry, which certainly owns capital, and that he wrote off as the lumpenproletariat.

We often use the word Capital to describe currency or owned object of any kind, but that's not really what Marx means when he says 'Capital'. How can owned land be 'capital' in one case but not in another? Because Capital is meant to refer to something which can be rented, loaned out, or otherwise gain interest or increase in value. The landowner who lives on and, say, subsistence farms a small tract of land is not equivalent to a landowner who owns a larger acreage that he rents out to farmers or factories or whathaveyou. The latter can use his land to function as an asset, while the former is not in a position to property capitalize on what he owns.

A word I like to use instead is asset; which has the explicit meaning of something that will increase in value and is relatively liquid.

> Indeed: there is no such thing as a capitalist class, because everyone who participates in the commerce of society owns capital of a sort.

But, as I hope I've explained, Capital is a matter of scale. Enough money to live on is not capital, as it must be spent and can't be used to invest in assets capable of generating more capital with relative independence. If one can leverage their capital to the degree that they no longer need to sell their labor, makes one a capitalist. The ownership of something that could be capital depending on the circumstances does not.

If you don't like Marx, the best book for pointing this out is actually Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki-
http://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612680011

His intention, of course, is to explain to everyone why it's good to be and how to be rich; but in doing so, he defines a worldview that is almost pure Marxism.

1. The first half that you talk about is well known now, but that's because of Ben Graham. Don't forget, the original edition of the intelligent investor was published in 1949 nearly 70 years ago. Those ideas were revolutionary at the time. For someone who hasn't been reading about investing or done a lot of research those are also invaluable lessons to learn which is why the book is recommended so often.
   
2. If you're looking for some more detailed security analysis I think Graham's other book security analysis will cover what you're looking for. I haven't read it personally so I don't know for sure, but from what I've heard secondhand I think it covers it.
   
3. My own personal thought on the Intelligent Investor is that it's a good general book about the market and can teach you a lot. However, Graham is not the most engaging writer and reading through his book is a slog to say the least. I think there are other more recent books that teach the basics without being difficult to read. A Random Walk Down Wallstreet is one I've personally read that's good. I'm currently skimming through Heads I win, Tails I win and so far it covers the psychology of investing pretty well while also quoting from The Intelligent Investor directly. I've heard that The little book that (still) beats the markets is also good but I haven't read it personally.
   
4. One final thought is that some of the ideas presented in the first half aren't necessarily so obvious to most people. If they were, you would never get valuations into the triple digit (or infinite!) P/E ratios like AMZN, NFLX, TSLA, etc.
   
   Edit corrected the years to nearly 70 from nearly 60. Did anyone else know it's 2016 and not 2006?

It's OK to put in 1% as a learning experience.

A professional investor would typically put in a somewhat larger amount if there is a real edge.

One approach is the Kelly criterion, which says that if you want to maximize the growth rate of your portfolio over the long run, the amount to invest is edge/odds. In other words, if you have a big edge you invest more, if the risk/volatility around that edge is high you invest less.

However, even assuming you actually know the edge and odds accurately, the Kelly criterion position size takes a LOT of risk and volatility to maximize your growth rate. In general you would have an x% chance of losing 1-x% of your entire stack at some point in the future, ie a 50% chance of losing 50%, a 10% chance of losing 90%. Nevertheless, if you lived forever, that's the risk you would want to take to maximize your growth rate.

On the one hand, the Kelly Criterion, the long run persistence of an edge in equities in the form of the equity risk premium, and an understanding of human psychology all suggest that people don't really take enough risk.

There are 2 very good and a few not-so-good reasons to take less than the Kelly-optimal risk.

The first is you don't live forever, and it's perfectly rational to give up a big chunk of the growth rate for a MUCH lower risk of blowing up and impacting your lifestyle and opportunities of your loved ones.

The second, which is most important, is that you never really know the edge and the odds, best you have is a guesstimate. And if you take even a little more risk than Kelly-optimal, you will fall prey to the gambler's curse. Consider what happens if I give you a coin-flip where I give you 5x on your money when you win. If you bet all your money on each flip, you are guaranteed to go broke. Bet even a little too much, and you magically turn a huge edge into a guaranteed big money-loser.

But most people never even approach Kelly-optimal betting. They are risk-averse, and extremely loss-averse. Pro money managers could never tolerate the swings involved.

Warren Buffett put something like 40% of his portfolio into American Express in 1963. His view of value investing is to invest as if you have a lifetime 20-hole punch card. Every decade-ish long market cycle, you will have a few really great opportunities. Invest so at the end of your lifetime investing career, you'll have accumulated 20-odd meaningful positions in really great companies.

It's worth pointing out that EVERY time Buffett has underperformed, there has been a litany of articles about how he has lost his touch. Partly it's because it makes interesting copy, and people love to build heroes up and tear them down. But partly it's because the game involves taking risk and sometimes pain in the short run. And non-investors don't get that. You're an idiot if you underperform in the short run. Value investing works in the long run because it's hard and inflicts pain in the short run.

For the apprentice investor, it's even harder. So it's important to keep bets no larger than your personality can comfortably withstand. If 1% is it, that's what it is. Don't look for approval from anywhere else. It's good that you are erring on the low side...a lot of people get overconfident and then blow up, or blow out a good position because they can't stand the pain when they are down.

Over time, you want to get more comfortable trading closer to a Kelly-optimal size, without going over the edge of your personal pain threshold. As a small investor, you have some disadvantages in information flow, resources to apply to investing, but you have a big edge: the only person you need to please is yourself. You don't need to do a goddamn thing if you don't want to, you can be opportunistic and you can take as much or as little risk as you like. Personally, playing poker helped me a lot ... you get an intuitive feel for how often you're going to lose when you have the edge, and get comfortable betting big when you have that edge, because you know in the long run it's going to work out.

Also recommend William Poundstone's Fortune's Formula, which is an awesome read on Bell Labs' Kelly and Shannon, who invented information theory, and applied it to investing along with MIT colleague Ed Thorp, who invented blackjack card-counting and started one of the first, most successful hedge funds, and the occasional mafioso and degenerate gambler.

And you won't go wrong reading all of Buffett's essays and letters.

http://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Formula-Scientific-Betting-Casinos/dp/0809045990/

http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/rtfiles/cbs/hermes/Buffett1984.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/The-Essays-Warren-Buffett-Corporate/dp/0966446119

[TL; DR] Bet small while you're learning. Get comfortable with taking risk when you really know what you're doing and have an edge. Learn the Kelly Criterion. Read Warren Buffett. Play some poker.

Here is a random article I found about stock simulators.

How do you like to learn things? There are tons of books, podcasts and blogs about investing. Here are some popular ones or ones that I have read and used

• Books
  
  • The intelligent Investor
    
  • A Random Walk Down Wall Street
    
  • Your Money Your Life
    
  • The Richest Man in Babylon
    
  • I Will Teach You to be Rich
    
    
• Blogs
  
  • Stock Series
    
  • Mr Money Mustache
    
  • Mad FIentist
    
  • dozens of others, Google is your friend
    
    
• Podcasts
  
  • Money Tree Podcast -- pretty poor production quality but good general stuff.
    
  • There are tons of others, Google it.
    
    Warren Buffett famously/supposedly read every book in the financial section at the library by age 12--I think the important thing to take from that is you are still young and have tons of free time and aside from starting to invest as soon as you can (you can usually start as soon as you have earned income) you should be investing in yourself...getting good grades, figuring out what you want to do after high school, trying out businesses, learning marketable skills (e.g., coding, good writing skills, good interpersonal skills, good organizational skills, etc).
    
    Good Luck!

I dont know why nobody has mentioned this but you can hire a property manager for about 10% of the monthly rent. This could relieve you of a lot of the headaches while simultaneously providing that income boost you're looking for.

Honestly this is a massive undertaking no matter which way you go so I'd like to suggest you to read a book I really enjoyed on rental property investing. I would also encourage you to seek out other books on topics like dividend investing and such so you can make an informed choice.

Anyways, this is the book I recommend- The Book on Rental Property Investing: How to Create Wealth and Passive Income Through Intelligent Buy & Hold Real Estate Investing! https://www.amazon.com/dp/099071179X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_B4v4DbXTMKKGA

In it you will find tips on properties worth investing in, calculations on profitability, tax strategies, property management questions, etc etc. It is a very informative book

You need to know some programming to develop a model, if you learn web scraping that will be enough to gather data for a model. You should be able to learn how to do this online.

For books, I'd highly recommend reading these:

Fortune's Forumula - A great book about the Kelly Criterion but touches on a whole range of subjects, a fantastic read.

The Signal and the Noise - Very famous book about prediction in general.

Conquering Risk - Very good book about sports betting (relatively unknown)

Calculated Bets - About creating a model and automated betting system for a relatively unknown sport.

Who's #1? - A book about rankings systems, aimed at ranking sports teams but the authors previously wrote a book on ranking websites (like google search algorithm type stuff). The basis for my dota model came from this book.


I'd recommend everyone to read Fortune's Formula and The Signal and the Noise, even people not interested in modelling. They're both awesome reads.

Calculated bets is a pretty cool read if you're interested in modelling, the author has a really quirky writing style that's entertaining.

Conquering risk is basically about exploiting bookmakers, picking off mistakes. Not really about modelling but still pretty cool.

Who's #1 is a really good intro to making a model for predicting sports imo, there's some very simple ones that will get you started.

I can tell from your perspective that your work experience is limited in the corporate world to one or few companies. I'm 40 and worked in tech startups most of my career before starting a business. When you work in tech startups, the average time you're at a company is a year or two, so I've worked at a lot of places. I also consulted for a couple of years and bounced from company to company. I've worked at plenty of places where the executives all have corporate credit cards and charge meals regularly. I've charged meals at companies I've worked for thousands of times. At several dotcoms I've worked at it was customary to have breakfast provided daily and lunches catered on a regular basis. When my company had offices we provided breakfast each Monday, and did a bbq every Friday, and it's all deducted as business expenses on taxes. None of that appears on anyone's pay stub. Your company may have a policy of billing execs for your corporate cafeteria, but that's not how the rest of the business world works.

I've also worked for companies that have kept permanent corporate apartments. They were regularly used by software engineers that we would fly in from other states or Russia where we had an office. Some were in these apartments for over a year and none were billed for rent. They kept their primary residence and some were flown back regularly. One guy from AZ was going back every weekend.

My mother owned a real estate business. She wrote off part of the house where her office was, and wrote off her car as a business expense. I once worked at a software company where someone in the accounting department sent an email to all asking who had a particular cell number because it was being billed to the company and wasn't on the internal phone list. The phone was being used by the CEO's 75 year old father who didn't work for the company or know how to turn on a computer. Companies can write off plenty of things which benefit executives.

Companies that are pre-IPO can offer shares at much lower rates than what they know it will IPO for in a year or two. There's a flaw in your assumption that a particular executive has a hand in the success of the company when stock prices go up and they profit from ISOs. Sometimes a certain sector becomes the hot stocks and the price goes up. Other times executives offshore jobs, sell off assets and divisions of the company to artificially boost profits and the stocks go up temporarily, but it hurts the company in the long run. Sometimes companies acquire other companies and the stock goes up temporarily, but it hurts the company in the long run. I worked at a company where we begged the CEO not to do an acquisition. The stock went up, he made millions. Six months later, when the competitor was able to sell their stock, they dumped it on the market, and drove the stock into a downward spiral that the company never recovered from. There are thousands of dotcom millionaires that worked at companies which never made a penny in profit and went out of business.

If I want, I can setup a company that is seeking commercial real estate opportunities. Then, I can expense trips to Hawaii, Europe, or anywhere I want to go. The company can operate at a loss for a couple of years, and all of my trips can be deducted as a business expense even if I don't buy any real estate. Then, I can fold up that company, and open one that looks for timeshare opportunities.

The top 1% is not paying 35% federal, 8% state and 3.876% city. They are using these loopholes to pay far less. A lot of stars don't get paid directly from studios, they incorporate themselves so they get to write off everything they can, and pay taxes only on what's left over at the end of the year.

There's a book you should really read called, "Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money--That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!" by Robert T. Kiyosaki. It's only about 200 pages and it's a quick read, not very academic, but full of good business information and a nice story. Here's the amazon link, but it's probably at any bookstore you pass by. http://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Money-That-Middle/dp/0446677450

Yeah completely understandable, it's not too complicated, but from an outsiders perspective can look daunting. I can't really recommend any specific financial advisors, but if you have the time to do some reading I can recommend a few things that will help you out. A Random Walk down Wall Street and The Intelligent Investor are great, easy to read introductions to value investing, while this post on /r/AusFinance gives some pretty straightforward and practical advice.

While its not the advice you're looking for right now, do consider it as it may help save you thousands of dollars in the long run.

I have etrade. If they were added by the company then there shouldn't be transaction fees. A brokerage account at etrade charges 7.95 per trade. If you do more than 30 trades a quarter then they'll drop that to 4.95. With that little in the account right now, 7.95 is a lot and will eat away at your money quick if you get into trading too much.
Someone else mentioned taxes, which will also erode your money if you sell before a year and a day. Long term capital gains mean you pay less in taxes on the money you make.
Now to the important part - this is your first stock experience, and you can get AAPL regularly at a 15% discount at a time when it's trading at a discount -- Do nothing, seriously. Lose your password and keep contributing to that purchase program. When you get about 5-10k in there, sure, diversify by adding a few good stocks or maybe an index fund.
You've got a great company at a great price; all you should be thinking about is buying more. Apple stock rewards the patient. Look back in a year or two and you'd kick yourself for selling in the 160s.
I've owned shares since about mid 2017. My first purchase of 30 shares was not even at as good a price as you got, i was in the 150's. Then it ran up to 225 or so last year, I sold half my position and took some profits up about 45%. It dropped in q4, so I stocked back up to just over 50 shares, again in the 150's. This is a stock that will come in and out of favor. But low, wait a year or two, sell high, repeat.
Finally here's a great entry level book on investing. Its short, cheap and has solid advice. https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-Investing-Money-Smart/dp/1477463992/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1549074984&sr=1-6&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=investing+for+beginners&dpPl=1&dpID=513T3piRHAL&ref=plSrch
sorry for such a long post, but you've got a good opportunity here and it sounds like you just need a little knowledge & patience. Good luck!

Wealthy parents teach their kids to work not to survive or have a comfortable retirement, but rather, to produce or acquire income-producing assets. The income produced by assets -- such as real estate or businesses -- are how the wealthy get wealthier. Eventually you don't have to work at all and you get richer while you sleep because the assets are doing all the "work." In theory, anybody with just a small amount of regular discretionary income could do this, but most people aren't taught to. Instead, they're taught to sink all of their money into a home and retirement savings. Inter-generational transfer of wealth (e.g., inheritance, "trust fund kids," down payment on home as a wedding gift, etc) gets all the attention and criticism as "unfair," -- but really it's the transfer of the knowledge about HOW to create wealth that is the real treasure handed down from one generation to the next, and the real reason for the perpetuation and resilience of the class system.

Edit: For more, read Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not by Robert Kiyosaki.

>Do you have any recommendation as to where I can start (e.g. reading, websites to compare, etc.)?

the usual suspects:

• Bogleheads wiki - An invaluable free resource. I think it is easier to come here when you have specific topics you have questions about
  
• Bogleheads Guide to Investing - is a good book on general personal finance topics and gives a general overview of investing topics
  
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing - will show you why low cost index funds are a good idea.
  
• If you can - is a quick free PDF you can read quickly and get the core gist of what passive investing is about. Bernstein is a great writer, he has really good books to in case you are interested.
  
  justETF is a good resource to find ETFs. morningstar is also good.
  
  
  
  >Is there also some more "direct" ways of investing into stocks without picking them yourself?
  
  Easiest when living in Germany would be to get a depot account in a cheap broker. justETF has a comparison of some.
  
  You may also consider DeGiro or InteractiveBrokers.

Tim Hale's Smarter Investing to start with, if you haven't already.

Then Rick Ferri's All About Asset Allocation looks ideal - I haven't read it myself, but it's in the top recommendations on the Bogleheads wiki and from the description there it's perfect for you. But read Smarter Investing first.

You've made a number of active investment decisions. Your portfolio is a bet that returns from technology companies (Framlington Global Tech, whose 3 largest holdings are Apple, Google and Facebook) will beat the market average, as will anything picked by Neil Woodford.

The US has about 7 times the market capitalisation of the UK, but you've bought equal amounts of the FTSE 100 and S&P 500 funds. Why did you make that decision? However most of what you have held by Farmington will probably be in the S&P 500, too (the top 3 companies are, for a start - 30%), so you have overlap there - do you know how much?

You've probably got a global spread in the Legal & General fund, but I've already said how you've favoured the US & the UK, and you've also chosen to bet on Japan over Europe. You have about £65 in AEON Fantasy Co., Ltd, and not a penny of Halfords or Debenhams stock.

The majority of professionals don't beat the market average. [1, 2, 3] Your selection is fine if you've chosen it on the principle you, and hence it, can but if you just chose it at random then you should at least ditch the funds with the highest costs (i.e. Woodford).

Your portfolio should have a purpose, and it should be constructed to meet that purpose. If your purpose is as simple as "I want to invest in stocks" then you can do that by buying a single fund (or just two of those listed above, about 93% of it in the LEGAL & GENERAL UT INTL INDEX TRUST I ACC and 7% of it in the DB X-TRACKERS FTSE 100 UCITS ETF).

I really like this idea, and it's pretty much what I'm doing. Last year I posted something about this here on r/financialindependence and I've also exposed my lifestyle here.

Since my teenage years, my goal has been to live free. I stumbled upon FI books early on ("Boglehead's guide to investing" anyone!?) and figured hitting FI early on was possible and desirable. I majored to be an Actuary and while studying, I started creating websites and doing other freelance work on the side. These projects took off very slowly, but were enough to pay for random college expenses.

When I graduated, I took a gap year and my freelance work was enough to sustain while traveling through Southeast Asia. At that point, I was netting ~500 to 1000$ a month from 20 hours of work (per month). I loved the lifestyle of working an hour or two every other day. It just became something I did once in a while on the computer instead of (or actually, while) browsing Reddit or FB.

I realized that if I roughly doubled this income, I might be able to sustain this lifestyle permanently. Coming back home (to Canada), I invested a lot of energy expanding several streams of income (mostly freelance work) and eventually it paid off. I even had the luxury of turning down 9-to-5 high-paying actuarial jobs.

Remote work now takes roughly 5 hours of my time each week (and 95% of that can be done whenever I feel like), and it allows me to live in a very low COL area, which ironically might help me reach FI sooner than if I worked in a HCOL city as an Actuary. Although I wouldn't mind living like this for a long time, I'm on track to become financially independent at around 30 y/o (in ~5 years).

While I understand that for many, working part time is not an option, trying a lifestyle that resembles "FIRE" (lots of free time, low stress, no financial worries) can really be beneficial. I feel like many blindly aim for FIRE because they dislike work, or like the idea of not having to work, and while I can fully understand why, living for the future is a dangerous gamble. Not because "you might die before" as stereotypical consumers might claim, but because of the terrible mental habits you risk developing. I believe that people overestimate the reliability of postponing happiness for extended periods of time. While the grass is quite green without work, in itself it doesn't do much, it only makes you more of what you already are.

Happiness is largely determined by mental habits. If you are not developing great mental habits RIGHT NOW, they won't magically appear the day you retire. All around me, I see people waiting for retirement to finally travel/invest time in passions/develop skills/etc. I'm skeptical of how well this works in practice. I have the feeling that people would benefit from treating their mental habits with the same care that they show towards their bank account. Surely you don't want this path to mentally cripple you and end up like this.

Like others mention, I wouldn't really call myself "half-retired" though. It's really nothing more than a cooler lifestyle. (subjective, of course).

A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. FIRE here - congratulations on your new job. I am retired early and happy (just about to hit Breckenridge for a season of skiing). I got into commission based sales and worked my tail off to retire early. My advice is -EDUCATE YOURSELF about money. Thats what I did. My efforts in sales were rewarded, but good investment and minimising tax made it happen. I'm going to recommend a book which started me off its called 'the only investment guide you'll ever need' by andrew tobias http://www.amazon.com/Only-Investment-Guide-Youll-Ever/dp/0547447256. This is the easy to read book full of solid advice that got me started seriously on saving and investing. I went on to read many more, but I feel that if you only read one book and followed its advice, this should be it. It was so influential for me that I wrote and thanked the author the day I retired. Read the reviews for other opinion.

On your chosen career - Theres a lot to learn about sales, so keep your ears open and talk to seniors in the field. I remember one day I asked a senior sales guy 'How come we can't get good sales guys' and he said 'Cos good sales guys are selling ferraris where they make tons more commissions'. I followed that path and found the field where I could make maximum commissions for my effort. Many people look down on sales, but I was managing a large business and noted that the good sales guys were making more than me consistently, so I got wise and moved into sales. I couldn't find any other field where your reward was equal to your effort.

Edit: Link to book

No problem at all. Honestly the best thing I have ever read that has given me the most beneficial mind set towards money is the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. Its my financial principle bible. Ive read it at least 4 times thought high school and up to now. Listen to me when I say this and Just Read It. As far as stock specific goes, I used a site called wall street survivor Stock Simulation Game
It follows the stock market exactly and teaches you the basics starting out with a mock up 100K. I played it all through highschool and it has taught me SO much and saved me SO much. There are several other sites like this one but its just the one I've found to like the most. To give relation I'm in the same boat as you. In college and have a few thousand in the bank that I'm trying to make something with. When I say make something I mean I'm aiming for a 10% return on my portfolio after tax and commissions. Lastly and most important are my own personal rules, DONT touch your real cash until you have spent at least 6-8 consecutive months playing the security and keeping track of it in relation to it's industry. And when you do don't put more than 10% in any one security. Also Dont invest in anything you don't understand. And finally, the ultimate goal is to have all your money working for you creating a steady cash flow of passive income. <-- This is something I have still yet to accomplish but am hoping to in the next few years.

I'm finishing up school as well, and have recently gotten into personal finance. I read blogs like The Simple Dollar and Get Rich Slowly on a daily basis. They have large, search-able archives and are full of free information and tools that relate to personal finance. Wonderful resources.

If you're looking for good books to read I'd like to recommend The Millionaire Next Door. By far my favorite, this book completely changed my thinking about personal finance.

Some others:

The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need

The Boglehead's Guide to Investing

The Automatic Millionaire

See if your library has any! Oh, and here's a longer list from GRS:
Building a Personal Finance Library: 25 of the Best Books About Money

It's card game that is collectible, but doesn't have the reserve list like MTG, nor is large like MTG. Overall, if you want to invest in something, get Bogleheads Guide to Investing: The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118921283/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awd_B3V1wbEYNFAWE

P.S. I am a former broker and can assure you, collectible card games are too risky to be considered investments. What you are doing is speculating on a commodity that is based upon artificial scarcity. An investment is something that has value and means of production or growth in terms of value added.

Think about this way. Force of Will has no true model to create real scarcity. They could reprint expensive staples and cause the market to collapse. Magic the Gathering is similar; however, the reserve list (an artificial scarcity) causes prices of old cards to continue to rise on the condition that they would never be reprinted. The risk in MTG, however, is that WoTC could choose to get rid of the reserve list - though not very likely - and cause the secondary market to collapse.

Buying ETFs, stocks, bonds, and mutual funds are actual investments into organizations that have a means of production and/or actual income. Buying a card that produces no income, adds no value, has no means of production, and only relies on growth due to artificial scarcity is a bad idea.

Either way, it's your money and I am one of few brokers who will tell you this secret, and that is only you have your best financial interests at heart. I can only provide some advice to guide you, but you will have to make the final choice. Good luck my friend :-)

You're doing great you now have a very good emergency fund but you need to change where you are putting the money you save moving forward. Change your 401k contributions to 22%, this is about 18k/year (the yearly max contribution). Then open a ROTH IRA and contribute 5.5k annually. These are tax advantaged accounts, make the most of them. For both of these investments and your age you want about a 80:20 stocks:bonds ratio, you can use a target retirement date fund to get this ratio but make sure the fees are low (<0.2%). You mentioned you wanted something more liquid than a ROTH IRA elsewhere but the ROTH is the most liquid tax advantaged account available (You can withdraw your contributions tax and penalty free at any time. Your earnings need to meet certain criteria to not be penalized when withdrawn). Any remaining savings should go into a money market account where it can mildly/safely grow and become a downpayment on a house. If after all this you find you still have extra savings start a taxable investment account that is well diversified. Individual stocks are little more than gambling, sure you might hit it big but you may also lose it all. You're young, play the long game to get rich and you'll maximize your chances to do so.

Also read this book sometime before you are 30, https://www.amazon.com/Allocation-Second-Professional-Finance-Investment/dp/0071700781

>i am ready to open a Roth IRA and Brokerage, so i did with Fidelity.

>...

>i feel like just dumping all my money into Vanguard Target Retirement 2060 isn't the best idea

It's perfectly OK to have your investments in a target date fund while you learn more. Given your Roth IRA & brokerage are with Fidelity, the Freedom Index target date funds will be just fine (the Freedom funds without "Index" in the name are more expensive).

>i do want to actually learn a little more than "just dump your money in this target date fund"

The Bogleheads Wiki is a great place to start. There are links to a high-level page on lazy portfolios and specific pages for the Three-fund Portfolio, etc. The page on tax-efficient fund placement will likely be useful as your brokerage account increases.

Personally, I recognized there is value in simplicity. To that end, I work toward a version of a Three-fund portfolio myself. While I do not tilt toward small caps or specific sectors (like REIT), I do have a portion of my bond holdings in an intermediate tax-exempt fund.

Take your time. Consider developing an Investment Policy Statement. Read a book or two. Of course, posting here and/or the Bogleheads forum are great for providing context & examples or clarifying concepts along the way. Let some of the concepts sink in and ruminate before actually changing your portfolio.

Cool, well your learning attitude will serve you well!

As a bit more of an overview, the VT ETF contains 8,116 stocks. That means when you buy that, essentially every working stiff on the face of the planet from the janitors to the CEOs is working to make you rich. You collect value in terms of profits coming back to you in dividends as well as gain in value of the stocks.

You feel passionately about weed stocks, but what if oil has an amazing next five years. What about health care? What about autonomous driving cars? What about energy? What about technology? With VT you own all of it, including the up and coming ones you didn't even know about or predict.

And don't trade or try to time the market. Just buy and hold. Take a look at this portfolio growth calculator. VT will grow about 10%/year over time. Your gains can be massive if you can sock away a little more every month.

And read this book. It's $3 on kindle, $7 on paperback, 100 pages and it will make you a millionaire.

by far
https://smile.amazon.com/Only-Investment-Guide-Youll-Ever/dp/0547447256?sa-no-redirect=1
Everything you need to know could fit on an index card, but this book really breaks everything down. You'll be amazed at how simple it is once you understand.

As an example of debt being good, I bought an apartment in a building which was so distressed (and helped turn it around since) that banks wouldn't give a loan. I had to raid my retirement & buy in cash.

So instead of paying 50k upfront & a 100k loan at 2%, I paid 150k upfront.

Had I taken a mortgage I would have paid $2,000 for the privilege of borrowing 100k, but I would have also been able to leave the 100k invested and made $6,000, for a net profit of $4,000.

Debt is a tool, it lets you take opportunities you wouldn't be able to otherwise. If you wait until you can afford something you lose out on it's benefit the whole time you are saving, and if it means you have to instead rent in the meantime you not only lose the benefit, but pay a premium for the privilege.

Inflation reduces the value of a dollar by 2% every year. So 100$ worth of stuff today will cost you 102$ next year. If you are saving you are also chasing a moving target.

Having debt (and paying it off) also proves that you are trustworthy & banks can give you a good rate at 3% instead of 9% when they worry you won't pay it back.

Debt is a tool, and if you use it to buy things which make you money it's a good bet. If you use it to buy things which cost you money/lose value it's a bad bet.

Since I own my apartment now I could take a loan against it (and probably should set it all up now). If I can get a loan at 3.5% I could then invest that money & get 7%, net 3.5%. Of course there is risk involved in this, but over a long enough period you might as well bet on the economy since if it crashes & never comes back you have bigger problems anyway.


If you live in NYC I can lend you my copy of the book. I've bought it for a half dozen young people I care about as it was really illuminating for me & answered soooooo many questions I didn't understand well enough to ask. Everyone I know has a lot of anxiety around their finances, but this will show you how to think about money & what is worth the effort/what isn't worth worrying about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

First off, investing in individual stocks in the stock market is essentially gambling and I don't recommend it. The stock market isn't a way to get rich quick and the vast majority of people who trade individual stocks will do much much worse than someone who just purchases shares in a diverse passive index fund. However, if you want to try your hand at gambling in the stock market, it's not difficult to actually do it...

1. Open a brokerage account at a discount broker like Fidelity
   
2. Deposit some money into said account
   
3. Purchase shares of stocks with said money
   
   Be aware that there is a fee every time you purchase or sell a "lot" (one or more shares) of the same stock. This fee eats into your profit so it's not normally a good idea to purchase small amounts of shares at a time.
   
   Also be aware that buying and selling stock creates a taxable event. So filing taxes in the following year WILL be more complicated (and expensive) if you pay someone to do them for you or if you purchase software to do them yourself. No more 1040EZ forms.
   
   You should get a few "investing in stocks for dummies" type books and gain a basic understanding of things like market/limit/stop orders, cost basis, long/short term capital gains, capital losses, qualified/non-qualified dividends, splits, reverse-splits, and the wash sale rule.
   
   You should also learn what "penny stocks" are and why you should avoid them as well as what a Master Limited Partnership (MLP) stock is and why it can be a tax nightmare.
   
   As a final bit of advice, I highly recommend picking up a copy of A Random Walk down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing and reading it cover to cover.
   
   Good luck.

You mentioned a deadline. How much time do you have to absorb this and do some more thinking?

>All that matters is getting concrete reasons for why people think RE will not appreciate in the future.

Here's a couple:

1. Interest rates. They're currently at record lows. If the economy recovers and the central bank raises interest rates to prevent inflation, mortgage payments will go up, and real estate prices will go down. I'd suggest checking what your mortgage payments would be at 5% and 7%. (My first mortgage was at 11.75%.)
   
   
2. For this condo in particular, cash flow is negative, In other words, the rent isn't high enough to cover the mortgage and other expenses, even with interest rates at record lows and a 20% down payment. Even with stable interest rates, it won't be an attractive investment for other buyers unless the price was considerably lower. I'd suggest calculating how much lower the price would need to be to reach a cash flow of zero.
   
   So there's pretty sizable risks here.
   
   Plus there's a risk-magnification factor: When you invest in real estate, you're highly leveraged (because you're borrowing 80% of the money from the bank), It's great when prices go up, but leverage cuts both ways. If the price drops by 10%, you've lost 50% of the $60,000. If the price drops by 20%, you've lost all of it.
   
   Honestly, this thread is educational for me, in the sense that I can see what people are thinking when they buy new condos at inflated prices. (Prices have been going up, so it's natural to think that they'll keep going up.)
   
   If you don't want to tackle the risks of investing in equities (and I understand that), my suggestion would be to save your money in GICs instead. Low return, but also much lower risk of losing your money. "Live in a hovel for 10 years, then buy for cash." You're paying rent, but then you don't need to pay interest (which on a 25-year mortgage is huge).
   
   If at some point in the distant future you change your mind and decide you'd like to learn about equities, Andrew Tobias has an excellent explanation in The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need:
   
   >What a stock is worth depends at any given time on the alternative investments that are then available. It is a question of relative value. Think of investments as wallets. A 5% savings account, if you can find one, is a wallet that you can buy for $20 that miraculously fills up with $1 (5%) by the end of every year. It is safe and convenient - you can "sell" it whenever you want and be sure of getting back your full $20 if, when savings accounts are paying 5%, you can buy other "wallets" that fill up with $1 just as fast, not for $20 but a mere $15. For example, high-grade corporate bonds that pay 6.7% interest.
   
   Similarly, when you buy a share in a company, you're buying a share of its earnings, and you can tell if it's cheap or expensive by comparing its earnings per share to current interest rates. When interest rates are at 5%, the price/earnings ratio on the savings-account "wallet" is 20, so a stock with a price/earnings ratio of 20 would be very expensive. (You want it to be considerably less than that, to compensate you for the risk that the company's earnings might drop, or that it might lose money.)
   
   You can also evaluate real estate this way: after expenses, what's your return on your investment, and how does this compare to current interest rates? In this case, your return is negative, which is why everyone's telling you it's too expensive.

If I were you, I would put as much money towards college as you can. The less debt that you have the better in the long run. I'd also open an IRA. If you were to put in $10/month now, it would drastically compound later. Here is a [link] (https://research.scottrade.com/KnowledgeCenter/Public/Calculators/RothVsTraditionalIRA) to visually show you compounding.

I'd also suggest [this] (
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0547447256?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage) book. It's $10 and is well worth the money.

It's great to save for retirement and not have debt but no one has mentioned budgeting. Learning to budget is really important.

I'm 25 and started saving a few years ago. I get to go out for coffee and drink with friends when I want, but I still save 1/3 of pay checks for retirement/ savings.

Instead of buying lunch 5 days a week at work, I bring my own lunch 3 days a week. Let's say a meal is $7.

$7X5 days=$40/ week. $40x52 weeks= $2,080/ year.

$7x2 days=$14/ week. $14x52 weeks= $728/ year.

That saves me an extra $1352 to go out, to travel with, to pay off debt or to retire. Buying coffee at Starbucks daily is great but adds up.

You can work smart now and enjoy retiring at 50 or travel the world simply by being smart about your finances.

If you plan on not dying young, you will need to start saving for retirement, the sooner the better. This in turn requires not only saving, but investing to make sure that your savings at the very least, keep pace with inflation (and hopefully do better).

There are a thousand books on investing, and I can't say I've read even a fraction, but one of the better "level headed, time tested" books out there is "A random walk down Wallstreet"

http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/0393081435/

Markets will fluctuate wildly and beyond your ability to predict. The good news is that you have time on your side, and historically, the markets have had an upward trend.

Granted, this is all predicated on the idea that the country is not on fire in 10-20 years (best to stay out of /r/politics if you want to stay optimistic), but your best bet is to ride the trend of the general market over a long period of time.

Still, there really are no guarantee. Best to leave guarantees for death and taxes.

I can think of two that I've read that are good stories in addition to being informative.

Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone

This is a good book that talks about a system (a money-management method called the Kelly Criterion) that has roots in information theory and applications to stock market investing as well.

Here's a snippet of a review:
"Fortune's Formula is a fascinating study of the connections between such seemingly unrelated topics as gambling, information theory, stock investing, and applied mathematics. The story involves the stunning brainpower of men such as MIT professor Claude Shannon, who single-handedly invented information theory, the science behind the Internet and all digital media; Ed Thorpe; and John Kelly of Bell Laboratories, who developed the "Kelly criterion," a now-legendary investment strategy for maximizing growth while controlling risk. Initially, Shannon and Thorpe took Kelly's theory to Las Vegas and applied it to roulette and blackjack. Later, they took it to Wall Street and cleaned up--Shannon made a personal fortune while Thorpe created the highly successful hedge firm Princeton-Newport Partners. They both discovered that Kelly's system was particularly effective when applied to arbitrage (minute price differences that result from market inefficiencies). As Poundstone ably demonstrates, the merits of Kelly's criterion are still hotly debated today."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fortunes-Formula-Scientific-Betting-Casinos/dp/0809045990/

I also second the recommendation of /u/AndrewRichmo of "21" (originally published under the title "Bringing Down the House")

Hope this helps.

For a very beginner book on how to start thinking about money I would start here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Total-Money-Makeover-Financial/dp/159555078X
Dave Ramsey is totally against debt. If he could have it his way, nobody would even take out a loan for a house. You can make your own choice on how you feel about that, but in general the book gets you thinking about the power of freeing in your income to become financially independent.
After that, u/hayekspolsives pointed out a good resource, I would also recommend Rich Dad/Poor Dad:
http://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612680011/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408981397&sr=1-1&keywords=rich+dad+poor+dad
This book is also another book that will try to get you thinking differently. The truth is, there are many ways to invest. This is why there is so much info out there. The best way is the way that interests you.

Have you opened accounts like a Roth IRA or 401k (through work) or similar? Because you can invest within those accounts in whatever you wish, and you'll get great tax benefits.

For example, any money you put into a Roth IRA you can take out at any time for any reason. And you can invest that money into stocks, and the growth is tax-free and dividends are tax-free. (The government makes all that tax free to try and encourage you to save it in there as long as possible for use when you are old and retired.)

As for what to invest in: read about diverse, passive index funds. If you've never heard of those, there's a good book you can check out from your local library, Bogleheads' Guide to Investing.

• The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• Security Analysis - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• The Interpretation of Financial Statements - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports - Howard Schilit
  
  
• Applied Value Investing - Joseph Calandro
  
  
• Analysis for Financial Management - Robert Higgins
  
  
• Margin of Safety - Seth Klarman
  
  
• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings - Philip Fisher
  
  
• One Up On Wall Street - Peter Lynch
  
  
• Beating The Street - Peter Lynch
  
  
• The Essays of Warren Buffett - Warren Buffett
  
  
• Snowball: Warren Buffett and The Business of Life - Alice Schroeder
  
  
• Buffett Beyond Value - Prem Jain
  
  
• Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond - Bruce Greenwald
  
  
• You Can Be A Stock Market Genius - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• The Little Book That Beats The Market - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• The Big Secret for the Small Investor: A New Route to Long-Term Investment Success - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator - Edwin Leferve
  
  
• Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Taleb
  
  
• The Black Swan - Nassim Taleb
  
  
• Poor Charlie's Almanack - Charlie Munger
  
  
• Rediscovered Benjamin Graham - Janet Lowe
  
  
• The Theory of Investment Value - John Burr Williams
  
  
• Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger - Peter Bevelin
  
  
• Security Analysis and Business Valuation on Wall Street - Jeffrey Hooke
  
  
• Value Investing: Tools and Techniques for Intelligent Investment - James Montier
  
  
• Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset - Aswath Damodaran
  
  
• The Dark Side of Valuation - Aswath Damodaran
  
  
• Financial Statements: A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding and Creating Financial Reports - Thomas Ittelson
  
  
• Buyout - Rick Rickertsen
  
  
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert Cialdini
  
  
• Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes: Lessons from the New Science of Behavioral Economics - Gary Belsky
  
  
• The Warren Buffett Way - Robert Hagstrom
  
  
• The Most Important Thing - Howard Marks
  
  
• Competition Demystified - Bruce Greenwald
  
  
• Accounting For Value - Stephen Penman
  
  
• Distressed Debt Analysis - Stephen Moyer
  
  
• Bankruptcy Investing - Ben Branch
  
  
• The Vulture Investors - Hilary Rosenberg
  
  
• Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring - Stuart Gilson
  
  
• Distress Investing - Martin J Whitman
  
  
• The Aggressive Conservative Investor - Martin J Whitman

I really like Investopedia University. It's free and very informative and they will have pages with short videos/articles explaining terms and concepts as well. A good start would be their Financial Concepts and Index Investing entries. Also wanted to add their Retirement Plans page. You'll mostly want to read about Traditional and Roth IRAs, and Qualified Plans.

The biggest tip I could give is to just keep reading, I found I was actually interested in this stuff so it was easy to read all about it. If you don't understand something make the effort to learn and then continue. It doesn't have to be complicated, index investing is a great way to build wealth over the long term.

I never really read any actual books, because honestly the best advice for 90% of people would be to just invest in index funds, and there's plenty of free information online, but you can read The Boglehead's Guide to Investing.

Bill Ackerman has a good video that does a good job of breaking it down.

I'd start by looking at this webpage:
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics
This breaks down the steps of that flow chart for you. The simple flowchart is amazing for beginners.

I would then look into this blog. it has many useful topics but this post in general is a simple intro to see if you are interested in it:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-zero-to-hero-in-one-blog-post/

If these topics interest you I recommend this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Path-Wealth-financial-independence/dp/1533667926

Best of Luck.

Rich Dad Poor Dad

This book is a really easy read, but has a lot of great information in it. I read this right after graduating, and it really helped put life, work, money in perspective. After finishing it, I immediately got myself out of debt.

Not sure how this book will help you, but it would definitely be a good start.

Good luck and remember that you are not the only person who has felt like a underachieving 20-something. We all do (or have in my case).

I'll give you some books to use as a starting point. You want to start out as generally as possible and then follow what interests you. Someone can give you a list of top books, but if they don't fascinate you enough to really dig in deep and reflect on them to sate your own curiosity, you'll just be scratching the surface. I don't care what it is, you can make money anywhere in the markets. So starting generally will help you find out what direction to go.

So, that said, these are the ones I'd recommend starting out with
https://www.amazon.com/Market-Wizards-Updated-Interviews-Traders/dp/1118273052
https://www.amazon.com/Reminiscences-Stock-Operator-Edwin-Lef%C3%A8vre/dp/0471770884
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400063515/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684840073/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809045990/

Some less conventional ones I really liked
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1578645018/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422121038/

Chaos theory describes some properties that pop up again and again in markets. I really liked this one.
https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Simplicity-Bringing-Order-Complexity/dp/140006256X

I also highly recommend finding a few good books on behavioral investing, just to get acquainted with the common mistakes investors make (how you can avoid them, and how you can exploit them). I don't have a lot here because the books I read are outdated and you can find better. So one example:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470067373/

But in general reading about psychology will help you understand the world better, and that's always a good thing.
https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202

After reading the Intelligent Investor the below books are pretty good for a read as well.

You Can be a Stock Market Genius (Stupid title but great book) by Joel Greenblatt

Dhandho Investing Mohnish Pabrai

Rule #1 investing this is a good podcast for beginners they have a book as well

One up on Wall Street Peter Lynch

common stocks and uncommon profits by fisher

Berkshire Hathaway letters to shareholders

Security analysis by Graham and Dodd. This was written before The Intelligent Investor by Graham as well and covers how to value companies. It's a very dry read and originally written in 1934 but there's a gold mine in there.

Having two fathers and two mothers competing over your love can be the best thing ever. One teaches you the shrewdness and cut-throat world of winning deathmatches and earning respect through force, the other teaches you the socially optimal solution, how to be poor and find pleasure and joy with a mat and a guitar.

Story reminds me of the writer from Rich dad poor dad: https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612680011

Those are definitely competitive rates. He's probably hiding some additional fees though, like the expense ratios of the funds themselves, and any load fees.


However, the best thing to do is absolutely to continue to manage things yourselves. There is very little value that a CFP can add over just doing some research, after all, who cares most about your financial future, you or some guy who is just after $0.7% of it?

The wiki of this sub has a lot of great information, you may also want to check out some books like The Bogglehead's Guide to Investing. I can guarantee you that the $14 you spend on that book will give you a better return on your money than the 0.7% you pay an advisor....

There's 3 kinds of incomes: A, B, and C income:

C - A job, the worst way to make a living. Working for another man trading dollars for hours. Slogan: "I'll learn to love (tolerate) what I do and live with what it gives me, at least until I save up enough money to strike out on my own."

B - Contracting work, a business you work. Trading dollars for hours still, but you work for yourself and set your own price. Example, creating and selling products or providing a service. Slogan: "I get paid what I'm worth because I work hard, make my own hours and prices"

A - Passive income streams, AKA residual income, a business that runs itself. Acquire a system of assets. Assets vary greatly and are generally built over time. Examples: Owning a rental unit, owning rental boats, owning a storage facility, really anything you can rent out is an asset, owning an online business that generates enough money for you to pay a manager to run it for you, investments in an institution that pays off high-yields, a copyright that leads to royalty payments, Or setting something up so others can make money, and take a small percentage (Facebook & twitter). Slogan: "Key word: Ownership. I've worked hard, sacrificed for the future, and made tough decisions most people don't. So now I don't have to work for money anymore... my money works for me now!"

Some books on how to get to Level A: 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad', 'The Richest Man in Babylon' Good luck out there :)

Start With Why [Simon Sinek]

48 Laws of Power [Robert Greene] (33 Strategies of War, Art of Seduction)

The 50th Law [Curtis James Jackson]

Tipping Point:How Little Things Can Make a Difference and Outliers: The story of Succes [Malcolm Gladwell]

The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy [Ryan Holiday] (stoicism)

[Tim Ferris] (actually haven't read any of his books, but seems to know a way to use social media, podcast, youtube)

Get an understanding to finance, economics, marketing, investing [Graham, Buffet], philosophy [Jordan Peterson]

I like to think us/you/business is about personal development, consciousness, observing recognizable patterns in human behavior and historical significance. It's an understanding of vast areas of subjects that connect and intertwine then returns back to the first book you’ve read (Start with Why) and learn what you've read past to present. Business is spectacular, so is golf.



To Add:

Irrationally Predictable:The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions - [Dan Ariely] (marketing)

The Hard Things About Hard Things - [Ben Horowitz] (business management)

Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It - [Charlamagne Tha God] (motivation)

The Lean Startup: Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses - [Eric Ries]

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, How to Build the Future - [Peter Theil]

I wouldn't bother contributing until you've paid off the debt. It's not going to take you very long and those few months of contributions aren't going to make much difference forty years from now.

Once the debt is paid off, build up about 3 months of living expenses as an emergency fund. Then, contribute at least as much that your employer will match.

Within the 401k, you're going to be somewhat limited to the number of funds to choose from. Of those made available, go with the ones with a long track record of good returns.

To help you to better understand investments in general, I recommend picking up The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing. It's a great book and it sounds like you're in the perfect mindset to take advantage of everything it offers.

Best of luck!

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing by Taylor Larimore is a great introduction to investing. It might look silly, but it's not a silly book.

It's intended for "normal people" with no background in economics. It explains the basics of the stock market, funds, ETFs, bonds, etc., as well as the basics of investment — risk management, compound returns, value investing/fundamental analysis, etc. — in simple, understandable terms.

"Boglehead" is a humorous term for people who espouse the investing philosophy of John C. Bogle, founder of Vanguard — the largest and most consumer-friendly provider of mutual funds in the U.S. — and creator of the first commercially available index fund. Bogleheads usually recommend a simple "three-fund portfolio" as a diversification strategy, based on the idea that index funds by design will, over time, give non-professionals the best returns, as opposed to individual stock picking.

Bogle himself wrote a bunch of books. The Little Book of Common Sense Investing is supposed to be great.

> Got any investing advice for a college student with no real living expenses working part time?

Start here.

Since you're starting out, accumulating an emergency fund first in a savings account is likely your primary goal. Once you get down to step 4, then I would set up automatic investments into an IRA at Vanguard, with 100% of contributions into Vanguard Target Retirement 2060.

>I only ask since it's something I've wanted to learn more about for a while

If you want to learn more about WHY this is a good idea, I highly recommend reading through the Stock Series by JLCollins. He presents it in an enjoyable and not overly technical way to keep it interesting. If you prefer books, then the Bogleheads Guide to Investing is a great resource. Borrow it from the library to save some money!

My best advice as a student is to take full advantage of the career center at your college: resume review, internship opportunities, interview practice, etc. Attaining an internship in your field will give you a huge leg up on everyone else graduating with you.

TL;DR

Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany and Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start are both pretty good books on the subject.

The Mixergy podcasts are helpful as well, they're interviews with entrepreneurs in all sorts of different businesses. They usually have pretty good information on their whole business process from start to finish.

Other than that, depending on the business you're starting check out blogs of companies/people in similar areas of business. Startup Digest curates news from various startup blogs every week and sometimes they have pretty good information.

Wow. Ok, two things:

1. The article you are referencing is from 1996. This amazing review of exchange rate predictability by the leading scholar on the subject was published in 2013; and one of its key findings is that the success of different predictors in the FX markets changes over time, without any ability to forecast which one will be most (or at all) successful at any time. FX is literally the hardest thing in economics to forecast.
   
   
2. You clear haven’t read or have willfully forgotten A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which does a beautiful deep dive into the meaninglessness of “technical analysis”.

I am currently a resident in my research years and finally started taking an interest in my finances. I would argue that you do not necessarily need an adviser yet. You should do some reading first. Here are some websites White Coat Investor (WCI) and Bogleheads, which has a great forum and wiki. You should definitely read these 2 books:

• The White Coat Investor. It is a little to basic for me and I pretty much had zero knowledge about finances but its a quick easy read.
  
  
• The Boglehead's Guide to Investing. I personally think this is the gold standard for personal finance/retirement investing. (Read it even though it says not to if you have large loans). It is also a quick easy read but explains things considerable better than WCI book. It also discusses adviser and types of different advisers. Going forward you should make it a habit to read at least one finance book a year (treat it like CME).
  
  I too plan on PSLF (my residency + fellowship will be 9 years so pretty easy decision). My personal opinion is to live like a resident for 2-3 more years (no lifestyle inflation) and accumulate as much money as possible. That means renting for the same amount (if possible) wherever you move for you job. No new cars and the like... After just 2-3 years of this, you will have a decent chunk of money for whatever.

Yes, management consultants will happily take your money to do this. If there is a WeWork in your city they may congregate there.

There are also a large number of business guys looking for people like you to start companies with. Try hanging out at startup happy hour events.

These are not high-probability paths to success, though. You would be better off studying business strategy and trying to figure it out yourself.

Consider Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of the Start" which is a good introduction.

Read this First - This is an infograph that summarizes every financial blog/book I've looked at.

Books I've read that have been very helpful

1. I will teach you to be rich - I've reread this multiple times. Covers almost all things finance that you'll need to know in your 20's + 30's. Totally worth the money!
   
   
2. Beginners Guide To Investing - Breaks down investing in a very straightforward way
   
3. Rich Dad Poor Dad - Very Cheesy, but hits some great thoughts on how rich ppl perceive money, are willing to talk about it, and how they grow money faster than the poor and middle class
   
4. Your Money or Your Life - Haven't finished (feels a little dated, but hits some really good points on how to think of money and why you should change your habits)
   
   Books I haven't read but ppl reference:
   
   
5. A random walk down wall street - Why investing in single stocks is foolish
   
6. Possum Living - How to live cheaply
   
7. Dave Ramsey or Suze Orman - Both have very popular philosophies and spending strategies that are referenced all the time.
   
   Sites to Reference:
   
   
8. Mr. Money Mustache - All Financial Independence websites reference this site.
   
9. Money Under 30 - All things Personal Finance for our age group
   
10. Investopedia - Helps with the basics
    
    Reddit: (Search Top Posts All Time)
    
    /r/financialindependence
    
    /r/Personalfinance
    
    /r/FinancialPlanning

I honestly don't know much about insurance in the US, but term life insurance is almost always the way to go. I'd recommend searching /r/PersonalFinance for the name of the company to see if anything pops up.

As for the last part... that's why I recommend reading a simple book on investing. I'm assuming a modest cash buffer of about 6x your monthly expenses and then investing the rest.

Most people here will recommend investing in cheap, broad index funds, usually by instances like Vanguard. Popular funds as far as I know are VTSAX for stocks and BND for bonds.

Just to reiterate: Just pick up The Bogleheads Guide to Investing. Your future self will thank you.

I would like to recommend as fitting nicely with the 1 doge = 1 doge philosophy of "enthusiastic indifference" the following two references for those interested in economics and currency markets:

Evidence for the fact that the stock market is efficient so to try to beat or time the market is basically impossible:
A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Very helpful community for beginning investors:
Bogleheads Guide for Beginner Investors

Cheers!

1/2 in Vanguard S&P 500 and the rest in an equivalent fund focused on international companies. Diversity among the largest companies around the world. Vanguard funds have very lost fees so more of your money keeps working for you.

I have been reading this book. I think you would identify with it and like it. I don't necessarily follow all his advice, but a good principle.

The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1533667926/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Learn some basic accounting. Learn to balance cash flow. Use Quickbooks/Quicken and bill pay.

Try to not buy things that cost money. Try to buy things that will make you money.

Separate your career from your business.

Best book I ever read was Rich Dad Poor Dad ( http://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Money-That-Middle/dp/0446677450/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_a ) buy it used for a couple dollars. This book, through a 3rd grade reading level, will teach the basics of getting ahead...and most importantly, get you excited about it.

(Free video: http://www.betterdaystv.net/play.php?vid=190). Stay away from the courses and stuff...they're really expen$ive and I'm not convinced they're all that useful. ...and read other authors who's view points are different to round yourself out.

And so you know, I am closing on my 13th profitable real estate investment thanks to the teachings of this book. It's a great start.

> How easy/difficult is it to get a hold of stocks like Apple, Amazon and Walmart?

Very easy, perhaps too easy. You can start with Robinhood, but it's not an app for serious investors IMHO (E-Trade is, however).

What I've done so far is reading "The Simple Path to Wealth" by J.L. Collins. The book basically details how low-cost broad-based Index Funds (VTSAX in particular) are a safe bet and how they can help you get moderately wealthy over the course of several years. It's not exciting or "sexy" but the thing is, just like most things in life worth doing, there are no shortcuts.

first: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre

Next:
Whichever version of http://www.amazon.ca/Security-Analysis-Foreword-Warren-Buffett/dp/0071592539/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374797721&sr=8-1&keywords=security+analysis

Liar's poker is interesting. Skip wealth of nations in my opinion. I like it, but there are more pressing things to read.

Next, I'd say read this "Options, Futures and Other Derivatives by John C. Hull'


Read Brett Steenbarger's books on managing yourself (enhancing trader performance, and other)

Check out Jeff Augen books on options trading.

next: Trading in the Zone : Maximizing Performance with Focus and Discipline by Ari Kiev


>>>Most importantly, read on different topics.<<<

Read anything by Fabozzi fixed income, mortgages

I had a few in mind, but this was a great help to me: GS summer reading list has great titles: https://www.quantnet.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Goldman-Sachs-Suggested-Reading-List.pdf

Graham, Bill Gross, John Train, Peter Lynch

I really liked The Predators’ Ball and Den of Thieves


Also, consider spending some money and getting one of these courses: http://www.wallstreetprep.com/programs/ (I'm not affiliated with them, but when they were starting out, I got one of the programs on discount, didn't fully persue it, but I found presentations to be very helpful on valuations and LBO introduction.. I imagine they got even better overtime)

Do a tonne of reading. A lot of things are US based but the principles apply to Canada too. Read the investing for beginners info at about.com to get a grasp. Joshua Kennon is a pretty smart guy when it comes to investing and business but he really just follows the principles of Benjamin Graham (Warren Buffet's mentor). Security Anaylsis is very good as well as The Intelligent Investor.

Jim Collins just published a book called The Simple Path to Wealth, based on his excellent series of blog posts. It's an easy read and I highly recommend that you check it out.

But until you have a good understanding of how investing works, don't worry too much about it. Put your savings in an online savings account like Ally so you can at least earn some interest. Keep saving, do some reading about investing, and you'll eventually know what to do with your money. You're already ahead of the game just by virtue of thinking about this stuff.

There are a few schools of thought. On one side is the BRRRR method, where you leverage your properties to build your portfolio. Its riskier, but allows you to build quickly.

Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat: The BRRRR Rental Property Investment Strategy Made Simple https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947200089/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_JQSHDbXM4BE7R

The other end of the spectrum is Dave Ramsey's method, of paying cash in full for all your properties. It ties up your cash, but, if the market takes a down turn, you can afford to rent it out for the then market rates. Its far less risky, and slow to start, but most of your rental income is profit. And once you get a few paid for properties, the income starts rolling and you can build as big as you want.

The Total Money Makeover Workbook: Classic Edition: The Essential Companion for Applying the Book's Principles https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400206502/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_8SSHDbWCFDPG8


This one was on a list of recommend books

The Book on Rental Property Investing: How to Create Wealth and Passive Income Through Intelligent Buy & Hold Real Estate Investing! https://www.amazon.com/dp/099071179X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_yoSHDbKZR7WT0

The best thing you can do is read and then read some more! Find those articles about investing and start learning the language. You can probably find what you need from a couple of books at the library or you can find them on Amazon but if you need help understanding it, then get help. You can call an investment broker in your area and schedule a meeting. They will usually spend some time with you for free in hopes that you will invest with them in the future.


[Mandatory link to Bogle type book] (https://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing-Taylor-Larimore/dp/1118921283/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1526318235&sr=8-3&keywords=jack+bogle)

Hey! I just started investing as well. I jumped straight into ETFs for various reasons.

I think your idea is great. I wanted to mention that when you start nearing $10,000, take a look at this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Value-Simple-Practical-Complexity-Investing/dp/0987818910

You can find the PDF version online if a library doesn't have a copy. The only part I looked at is how to invest in ETFs using Questrade. I was intimidated by the Questrade platform and trading on a real stock exchange network. This walks you through how to buy and sell ETFs on Questrade which is perfect. You can also open a practice account on Questrade to try all of the buttons they have on their trading platform website. One thing to note is that the book is a little outdated as the user interface has changed. Regardless, you'll definitely find your way around easily.

Good luck!

• Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century
  
  
• Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence
  
  
• Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
  
  
• The Richest Man in Babylon: The Success Secrets of the Ancients--the Most Inspiring Book on Wealth Ever Written
  
  
• The Wealthy Barber, Updated 3rd Edition: Everyone's Commonsense Guide to Becoming Financially Independent
  
  
• The Automatic Millionaire, Expanded and Updated: A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich
  
  
• Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy
  
  
• I Will Teach You To Be Rich
  
  
• The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness
  
  Ich habe jedes dieser Bücher gelesen und kann es empfehlen. Ich würde jedes davon wieder kaufen und wieder lesen.
  
  
• The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing <-- Steht noch auf meiner Lese-Liste

Hi I'm not sure if these are the books you would enjoy, but I do have a couple of them in my pocket list:


Personally in recent years I'm interested in topics about algorithms/cryptology and economics, so The Code Book by Simon Singh, Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone, The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall, these are the ones of my all time favorite "history" books about math and science and their applications. : )


I can still come up with another (popular) book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, but I didn't really enjoy the book, guess I didn't agree some of the conclusions in that book. But maybe you would find it interesting. :)


Hope this helps! ☺️

Posting for postings sake really.

Early 20's small timer dipping my feet into the world of investing. My only experience is the 4 unit finance class I took in College last year and whatever snippets I've read from /r/PF (mostly ppl recommending you have an emergency fund setup, debts taken care of and vanguard retirement plan). I have A random Walk arriving this weekend but decided to get into it a tad earlier just to feel it out.

I purchased $100 of AMD stock over the last couple of months starting in Oct. through RH. Since my initial investment, I've gotten a return of 12% which I think is pretty good taking it for what it is. I see the stock doing much better in 1 years time and will hold out until then regardless of performance while continuing to dump my pre-budgeted spending money into it (usually $100/month).

Again, I know it's virtually nothing at the moment but I want to further chase these feel goods with initial investments into some other companies. SHOR, BBRY, TMUS, and FEYE are on my watch list and I plan on reading up on Utilities, Healthcare and Energy but one step at a time.

TLDR: Hi guys, Where do you recommend I look to learn about energy, health/pharm/utilities.

EDIT: what do any of you think about CPRX?

On What to Read


Here are some suggestions on books and websites:


The Millionaire Next Door by Stanley and Danko - https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Americas/dp/1589795474


If You Can by William Bernstein - http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/2books.htm


Free version is here - https://www.dropbox.com/s/5tj8480ji58j00f/If%20You%20Can.pdf?dl=0


The Investor's Manifesto. Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between by William Bernstein - https://www.amazon.com/Investors-Manifesto-Prosperity-Armageddon-Everything/dp/1118073762


The Bogleheads Guide to Investing - https://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing-Taylor-Larimore/dp/1118921283


The Coffeehouse Investor - https://www.amazon.com/Coffeehouse-Investor-Wealth-Ignore-Street/dp/0976585707


The Bogleheads' Guide to Retirement Planning - https://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Retirement-Planning/dp/0470455578


The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio by William Bernstein - https://www.amazon.com/Four-Pillars-Investing-Building-Portfolio/dp/0071747052/


Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey - https://www.amazon.com/Total-Money-Makeover-Classic-Financial/dp/1595555277


Personal Finance for Dummies by Eric Tyson - https://www.amazon.com/Personal-Finance-Dummies-Eric-Tyson/dp/1118117859


Investing for Dummies by Eric Tyson - https://www.amazon.com/Investing-Dummies-Eric-Tyson/dp/1119320690/


The Millionaire Real Estate Investor per red-sfplus’s post (can confirm this is excellent) - https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Real-Estate-Investor/dp/0071446370/


For all the M.Ds on here and HNW individuals, you might want to check out https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/ and his blog – found it to be very useful.


https://www.irs.gov/ or your government’s tax page. If you’ve been reading, you know that millionaires know more than your average bear about the tax code.


https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/7vohb3/money/


https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/3hzcvn/financial_advice_from_a_financier/


https://www.artofmanliness.com/2017/09/22/4-money-tips-4-personal-finance-legends/


Personal Finance Flowchart from their wiki - https://i.imgur.com/lSoUQr2.png


Additional Lists of Books:


https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_reviews


https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/books-4/


Subreddits


https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/


https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/ - I would highly encourage you to spend a half hour browsing their wiki - https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/index and investing advice - https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/investing


https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/


https://www.reddit.com/r/SecurityAnalysis/


https://www.reddit.com/r/finance/


https://www.reddit.com/r/portfolios/


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bogleheads/


MRP References


https://www.reddit.com/r/marriedredpill/comments/40whjy/finally_talked_to_my_wife_about_our_finances_it/


https://www.reddit.com/r/marriedredpill/comments/67nxdu/finances_with_a_sahm/


https://www.reddit.com/r/marriedredpill/comments/488pa0/60_dod_week_6_finances/ (original)


https://www.reddit.com/r/marriedredpill/comments/6a6712/60_dod_week_6_finances/ (year 2)


https://www.reddit.com/r/marriedredpill/comments/3xw015/how_to_prepare_for_a_talk_about_finances/


https://www.reddit.com/r/marriedredpill/comments/30z704/taking_back_the_finances/


https://www.reddit.com/r/marriedredpill/comments/2uzukg/married_redpill_finances_and_money/


https://www.reddit.com/r/marriedredpill/comments/3637q5/some_thoughts_on_mrp_and_finances/


https://www.reddit.com/r/askMRP/comments/8dwaqt/best_practices_for_finances_within_marriage/


https://www.reddit.com/r/marriedredpill/comments/588e5o/gain_control_of_the_treasury/


Final Thoughts


There are already a lot of high net worth individuals on these subs (if you don’t believe me, look at the OYS for the past few months). This should be a review for most folks. The key points stay the same – have a plan, get out of the hole you are in, have a budget, do the right moves for wealth accumulation. Lead your family in your finances. Own it.


What are YOU doing to own your finances? Give some examples below.

Welcome to the states! It sounds like you and your husband are doing quite well for yourselves. Saving for the future and being financially independent is a great goal to strive for. Maxing out your IRA and 401K is a great idea as it'll save money on taxes. Beyond that, I recommend low-cost mutual funds for nonpre-tax savings - a good book to read that's great for beginners would be The Boglehead's Guide to Investing. I also recommend checking out /r/personalfinance

As to worrying about lifestyle creep, there are a few tricks I like to do to keep me from spending needlessly. The first is to envision how long it would require me to work to be able to afford something. For example, you make $55k/yr or about $27.50 pretax, so if you see a new pair of shoes that are $125, you'd need to work for a little more than 5 hours to be able to afford them. Are they still worth it to you?

Another trick is to wait several weeks from buying large, expensive items. I like to set a price point for myself and if it's over that ($250) I need to wait several weeks to buy it. If I forget about it or find 2 weeks later I don't need it than I just saved myself money - it's saved me from buying a lot of needless electronics. This takes some will power, but I believe that you can do it.

I would just sell it and take the ~25% loss. You could do a lot worse. If you want a sound investment strategy, read the Bogleheads investment philosophy. They recommend dollar-cost-averaging your way into a diversified portfolio of low-cost, no-load index funds. You might also check out The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing. It is a great introduction to proper investing (not speculating, which is what crypto "investors" are actually engaged in). Your local public library probably has a copy. Even at $11/hr you can save for a comfortable retirement. If you can manage to save up $1000 in your savings account, you can buy an all-in one fund and simply put a fraction of your paycheck into it every month. It's hard to get rich quick, but easy to get rich slowly.

Judging from the broadness of your question, I'd suggest buying (or checking out from the library) a couple of books about investing. Start with the basics like: Charles Schwab, Peter Lynch, and Burton G. Malkiel. Right now, education is probably the best investment you can make (besides enjoying your life).

Ninja edit: It's good to be thinking and asking about investing, but, if you are serious about investing a serious chunk of money, learn the basics for yourself. You'll be better prepared to make the best decision for your money and your lifestyle.

No kids, mortgage, etc? If so then in order or priority:

• Contribute to the work-based plan (401(k), 403b,) enough to get the full employer match (the match is like free money, your best possible investment),
  
• Pay off high interest debt (a guaranteed high return, the next best thing to free money),
  
• Contribute to a Health Savings Account (HSA) if available (unlike many other tax deductions, there are no income restrictions to contribute to an HSA)
  
• Contribute the maximum to an IRA, traditional or Roth, depending on income eligibility
  
• Contribute the remainder of the maximum employee contribution to the work-based plan
  
  At this stage saving money (accumulation) is way more important than asset allocation (stocks, bonds, CDs, etc.)
  
  Buy this book and read it

>I’m 20 right now with 1.5M in savings.

You have a great head start compared to most people! Don't squander the money. You'll realize 1.5M isn't that big soon enough, if you haven't already.

>While I really do appreciate the groundbreaking and insightful concepts that he introduces in his books, I feel like it doesn’t specifically teach you how to invest especially if you are an absolute beginner

Yes, I noticed this too but there was one crucial lesson he taught in the book that people miss - cashflow management. What did you learn about cashflow management?

Don't underestimate that lesson. It's literally the key to becoming and staying wealthy. It's probably more important than learning how to analyze a company's financial statement, forecast price movement, etc.

Once you feel like you're ready, go and study the different methods for analyzing a company. I would suggest reading this book: Security Analysis and this. Those two books will teach you exactly what you're trying to figure out now in terms of "learning to invest".

Keep learning, don't stop growing.

I'm just a junior designer, but oftentimes in academics I was the group leader. So take this with a grain of salt that I may have no idea what I'm talking about but being a leader I always made sure there was clear public directions conveyed in two forms. Often an email before a meeting and then a verbal check in. I found people will often say they didn't get the email or try to wiggle out of commitments so you have to be the driver of change. I found that if I gave clear directions to everyone, and was available and approachable things ran smoothly.

As for reading I would recommend art of the start by Guy Kawasaki. Lots of great chapters about assembling teams and other aspects.

My opinion on a holding individual bonds, is that I would only do it if: a. I wanted to provide myself near guaranteed cash flows (via a bond ladder) or b. had significant amounts (hundreds of thousands to millions) to invest in bonds.

If you know you will need money at a certain date in the future, individual bond purchases (ie: treasury direct) or CDs could be useful. The bond fund's price will fluctuate greatly with changes in rates, so you bear some risk of the price being low when you want your cash. This is the risk/benefit to weigh. I am not concerned about this as my emergency fund at LMCU gets 3% interest and would cover about 6 month of expenses. I also hold roughly 6 months of expenses in precious metals. I view PMs as currency diversification, not as an investment. I like diversification, so I hold my emergency fund in USD and PMs. My bond allocation is entirely through VBTLX currently. Consider tax efficiency of how you hold your bonds.

Rick Ferri has a book All about asset allocation that covers the concept of reducing volatility leading to higher long-term returns. It is a little less deep/technical than Bernstein.

Bernstein has a series I really enjoyed call "Investing for Adults". Rational Expectations (Book 4) covers the volatility/return relationship. He can get a bit technical this series, but I think it is worth reading if you are going to do your own financial planning. (Note: I am also a nerd and enjoy reading about these topics). Four Pillars was also a great read.

I've read about half of these. Pretty dry reading. I would recommend the following:

The Wealthy Barber

I Will Teach You to be Rich

Bogleheads' Guide to Investing

All About Asset Allocation

The basic point of all of the books above and in the article is that you aren't going to beat the pros in investing, in fact the pros can't even keep up the same record from year to year. Index funds are the way to go. Other books above go over what the asset allocation looks like and also goes over insurance and other things to make your finances sound.


As an aside, I never could stick with a budget until using the software YNAB and now that I'm doing a monthly budget I am seeing massive benefits.

Oh hells yeah I do! I give this book to everybody because it's shockingly simple, easy to understand, makes no assumptions about pre-existing subject knowledge, is written clearly and consicely, and its format follows a logical progression that makes it accessible and the best recommendation for a high schooler or a school superintendent with a Harvard PhD, two people I've gifted this book and who both loved it and changed the way they handled their finances.

It's called The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing

I provided an Amazon link, where you can get it for around $15. I can't speak highly enough about this book. If most of your financial knowledge comes from what you've been reading that stock blog you mentioned, this book will change your life. Without any hyperbole, it most definitely changed mine.

I'd read A Random Walk Down Wall Street first. Then Intelligent Investor before Security Analysis.

The first book I read when I was a n00b was The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing. It's pretty simple and basic and made for total beginner's.

Also, you may want to read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator at some point.

Also, check out Robert Shiller's Financial Markets course.

Stock Charts is a good online introduction to technical and fundamental analysis.

Have fun!!

Edit: correction

It's kind of addictive when you start earning good money. You never want to go down. I just had a great two yr contract end and I'm using the cash generated over the next four months to market myself in a sector I'd love to be working in, next.

Also worth buying a copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad if you've not read it. The author's style annoys me, but his message is spot on. Just don't bother buying any of his other books.

And yes, better to freelance as the pimp than the hooker ;)

Dan from CCP has some suggestions for low cost ethical investing but the article is from 2010 and may not be current info. One of the commenters who says he's a fee-for-service advisor has created an Organic Couch Potato Portfolio that uses some of Dan's suggestions. I dunno about those solar bonds.. might not be super liquid.

Rebalancing is not that complicated. The Value of Simple by /u/HolyPotato explains exactly what to do (and has lots of other good information), otherwise there are some great blogs like Canadian Couch Potato and Canadian Portfolio Manager that can help.

I think everyone has to learn this for themselves, but don't overthink it. When I launched my passive portfolio I was checking on it every day, I was keen to reinvest my first dividends as soon as they were paid out, and I spent a lot of time researching, tweaking and convincing myself that what I was doing was right.

A year later I'm checking less and less, I have a 'meh' attitude towards doom and gloom in the financial news and I'm just gonna rebalance when I contribute to my portfolio once a year and leave it alone unless there's a crash.

Firstly, have a read of the investment order for new investors.

Then, if you have an emergency fund and no debts (besides HECS/HELP), then

• If you will be using it for something specific in the next 5-7 years (car, holiday, house deposit, etc), put it in something safe such as a term deposit or HISA. The stock market is not a bank account, you need to be able to allow time for your investment to recover from the ups and downs (well, the downs anyway).
  
• If you can leave it in there for at least 5-7 years, you should educate yourself on investing and create a plan.
  
  These are where a lot of the info in the above site came from, minus the Australian-ised part. I'd recommend them too, they're excellent.
  
  JL Collins Stock Series
  Road Map for Investing Success
  Passive investing guide - Monevator
  Bogleheads
  
  If you prefer books to sites (often laid out better), then
  
  The Simple Path to Wealth - JL Collins
  The Bogleheads' Guide to the Three-Fund Portfolio

See, this to me is the wrong way to think about business.

RIM was leader in enterprise systems until late last year and is still second. They have huge market share. They also hold niche markets like secure smart phones and tablets. From a business perspective, they are in an enviable position.

The problem isn't with their position; it is with their trend. If they had been on an upward trend to the position they are currently in, everyone would be screaming about how great they are. In business it is position that matters more than trend. A trend can change, and effort can be put in to change the trend if you understand it. Many companies have done this. Apple is a prime example of a failed company that turned it around and became a market leader. Twelve years ago everyone thought of Apple the way people think of RIM today.

RIM is in a good position right now, and if they make the right moves they can reverse that trend. iPhones/iPads are fine, but they aren't perfect. They became fashionable and trendy and possibly overhyped. Steve Jobs was part of that trendiness. With him gone, and iPhone losing its "newness", it seems to me the time is ripe to move to change those trends.

I don't know what the right moves are. The question is whether RIM can figure it out, or gamble correctly, to change those trends. They definitely have the makings for it with top notch hardware and OS software, key differentiators and niches, and potential (such as Android apps working on PlayBook and soon phones).

The over-reliance of investors (and "trendy" consumers) on trends is fairly well documented. (My favorite book on the subject right now is The Drunkards Walk, though a A Random Walk Down Wall Street is probably the better known classic.) It's what causes bubbles on the upswing, and undervalued stocks on the downswing. It's also why investors who ignore those trends and invest via risk management principles tend to do much better than trend followers.

I'm keeping an eye on RIM to see what they do. I certainly won't write them off yet.

Hi baldeagle1776! I'm going to throw out my meager recommendation in hopes of drawing out better ones from other people :)

Personally, I think this subreddit's FAQ section is a fantastic place to start - it's one of the best "overviews" of PF information I've seen anywhere.

Not sure if you're looking for introductory books or a deeper dive into topics, but my only other recommendation is "A Beginner's Guide to Investing" by Alex Frey. http://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-Investing-Money-Smart/dp/1477463992/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top?ie=UTF8

And I'm eagerly awaiting other people's recommendations here :)

I highly recommend The Bogleheads Guide to Investing and All About Asset Allocation to start with. They are both very understandable and you can read them in one weekend. It's your money and your life so it's worth it to spend a few bucks and an afternoon here and there to learn answers to questions you never even thought of asking before.

>at least half of American households have the majority of their networth in real estate.

Correct. Many/most Americans buy way too much house and are undiversified with a massive illiquid asset on their balance sheet. It costs them money and time to maintain while trapping them in one location and limits employment options. A healthy investment portfolio would have cash, bonds, stock, and some real estate.

Your original post asked specifically about real estate but I'm urging you to consider developing a long term workable plan beyond speculation and rental properties, which IMHO is shortsighted. You and your wife have a real shot at tremendous success because you are young DINKs with good income but you need to broaden your horizons a bit beyond the typical "let's buy real estate" idea.

I'm pretty much at the same boat with you (same age, Berlin, cash I'm sitting on) but my mortgage is a bit cheaper (1.04% since I made 50% downpayment I guess). So with 4% Tilgung and this 5% yearly payment, it should be paid off in 10 years, however, I'm still considering If will do it or will make this cash perform better when invested.

I currently have around 12% of my cash invested in ETF, the rest sits in my Tagesgeld. I will gradually increase the investment amount, since I only started last month so I'm still kinda learning before going full speed.

I suggest you to spend some time reading about it before going this path. finanztip.de has tons of info but only in German. The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing is a kind of classic book, a bit focused on US realities, but still gives a good overview of different investment instruments and personal finances.

The Book on Rental Property Investing: How to Create Wealth and Passive Income Through Intelligent Buy & Hold Real Estate Investing! https://www.amazon.com/dp/099071179X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_gzbrDb6QRAYFY

Also aside from reading this, check out the authors channel on YouTube he has some very informative videos about real estate. It’s called bigger pockets.

Also Graham Stephan on YouTube as well is another very knowledgeable and successful real estate investor.

I started out reading rich dad poor dad and it was my gateway drug. Now I’m on a mission to know everything about money.

Are you newer to investing? Not judging, just offering tools to become more knowledgeable!

If you are check out the following:

The Intelligent Investor: this is a classic book on investing, a must read - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060555661/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Pgh9Bb44B9X7W

The Simple Path to Wealth: NOT A GET RICH QUICK SCHEME. might not be everyone's cup of tea, but a great quick read. Good for retirement and more of a passive investment - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1533667926/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_6ih9BbYWRWH38

Baby Step #7: Build wealth and give!

Once your financial house is in order—all debts are paid off, emergency funds are fully funded, retirement contributions are maxed out, then the only thing left to do is keep finding ways to build wealth and enjoy it.

I've been reading a book this week (almost done) that has really helped me think of some things I can do once I get to that point myself. Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki really harps on the idea that money should work for you, instead of you working for money; the trick is to find creative ways to make that happen. It's got me really excited to get my debts and savings squared away so I can move on to the wealth-building stage!

Edited to add: In response to your remark about chasing income increases… read the book linked above! Don't just make it your long-term goal to keep finding ways to work for more money, when you could be finding ways to get money working for you! It's not right for everybody (it might not even be right for me), but the sooner people think about it like that, the sooner they can try it for themselves, the better their chances of achieving it!

There are lots of good ones, and they all say the same thing - max out your retirement plans and own total market index funds at Vanguard. The Bogleheads Guide is good if you don't mind paying. Some good free ebooks, too, for example Investing In Four Hours will be free Aug 5.

You are young, do yourself a big favor and learn to invest on your own. It's easier than you think. The earlier you learn it the sooner it will serve you for the rest of your life.

Here's a great starter (a random walk down wall street): http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/0393340740/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373618108&sr=8-1&keywords=random+walk+down+wall+street

Best $15 you will ever spend.

Buy and read these books (first):

Bogle on Mutual Funds https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/111908833X/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Bogleheads Guide to Investing
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118921283/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The Four Pillars of Investing
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071747052/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

After reading those, download Robinhood and put $100 in (no more) and play around for like 6 months before even thinking about trying to play with larger amounts.

-- OR - skip Robinhood and download "Betterment" and just slowly put money in there and build some wealth.

Happy Learning.

We read [This] (https://smile.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612680011/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485808481&sr=8-1&keywords=rich+dad+poor+dad) in school.

But in my opinion the best way is to make them pay the bills. Take them shopping and let them buy their own groceries for a week and then analyze what they could have done to cut cost or have a more balanced diet. Show them your expenses then have them get a job, rent an apartment and pay the bills (on paper). We did a project like this in college where you ran a company and every week you made choices like which insurance policy to get then next week your truck would break down, a competitor moves in, then your storage facility burns to the ground. (you could get more in depth like if they take out a credit card then don't pay on it bam drops their credit and they cant get the loan on the minivan when baby number four comes along.)

There's one way to consistently make a lot of money investing over a long period of time. It has worked repeatedly for nearly a century, producing numerous billionaires. It's the only approach that enables someone outside of Wall Street to consistently beat the market and get rich (over many years).

The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham
https://www.amazon.com/Security-Analysis-Foreword-Buffett-Editions/dp/0071592539

Margin of Safety, by Seth Klarman [pdf of book, out of print]
https://files.leopolds.com/books/Margin.of.Safety.1st.Edition.1991.Klarman.pdf

Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein
https://www.amazon.com/Buffett-American-Capitalist-Roger-Lowenstein/dp/0812979273

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Phil Fisher
https://www.amazon.com/Common-Stocks-Uncommon-Profits-Writings/dp/0471445509

You'll hear this a thousand times but read A Random Walk Down Wall Street. It has a good overview of America's market history, specifically the last decade. Make sure you buy a revised version.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393352242/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile

Some people may suggest Intelligent Investor and Securities Analysis but I found them very dated.

Also here is the r/personalfinance reading list:

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/readinglist

The single best book I've read is, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." I'm with the OP, fuck Suze Orman.

"Random Walk" is a fairly interesting/easy read for a personal finance book. Malkiel should convince you by the time it's through why index funds are the way to go.

If you want something more challenging after that, try David Swenson's "Unconventional Success" It was a much tougher read for me, I really had to slog through it. But Swenson's record is pretty amazing, and he makes a convincing argument about why it's important to set up a simple approach to diversification. And it really is simple - 6 different categories, rebalance annually, that's it.

If you're just looking to learn instead of fulfilling a degree requirement then it is a probably more useful to pickup a book and do it yourself.

Some useful subs:

• /r/personalfinancecanada
  
• /r/personalfinance
  
• /r/investing
  
  Some useful books:
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Common-Sense-Mutual-Funds-Anniversary/dp/0470138130
  
• http://www.amazon.com/All-About-Asset-Allocation-Second/dp/0071700781
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/0393340740
  
• http://www.amazon.com/The-Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising/dp/1589795474
  
  The takeaway is that when it comes to investing there is no secret that will make you rich overnight. Picking random stocks hoping they suddenly shoot up is no different than gambling. Even the most well paid people in finance with all of their years of schooling cannot consistently beat the market.
  
  Investing is a long term commitment.

Money invested early has a profound effect on how much you will have in retirement.

You are in a really unique point in your life where you have income that greatly exceeds your current needs. Your best course of action is to pile on the investments as much as you can. Take advantage of a Roth IRA, 401k or Roth 401k, and HSA if you are eligible for one. A 3 fund portfolio of low cost index funds is a good place to invest taxed income.

Your biggest problem will be lifestyle inflation. Now that you have extra money, you will be tempted to spend more and let your expenses creep up. Try to hold this off as much as possible since it's easy to get used to spending more, but hard to get used to spending less. A good way of doing this is to only have the same amount of money hit your main account(s). Have the rest put into retirement accounts or investment accounts automatically. Out of sight, out of mind really helps here.

I would highly recommend reading The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing.

3 great books to read, in descending order of importance:

The Mousedriver Chronicles (Couple of kids out of Wharton starting a company around a mouse shaped like a golf driver)

The Art of the Start (Guy Kawasaki- Entrepreneur's instruction manual.)

The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell- good explanation of how to select the few important things to do to make your snowball into an avalanche.)

Hit me up via pm if you have any further questions. You're where I was about 2 years ago.

there are 3-4 books that I keep at least 2 copies on-hand of, because they are informative and I like giving them to people with no expectation of giving them back.

Ok this sounds like I am talking about religious texts - they aren't. They are:

- Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies

- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

- The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing

- The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (Little Books. Big Profits)

​

The first two are must-reads for engineers working in any kind of system, be it computers, electronics, mechanical, or people systems (project management, etc)

​

The last 2 I tend to recommend to people who think that reasonable investment awareness and decisions requires a lot of specialized knowledge and attention

If you want to keep it simple but effective, just like OP did, read this: The Simple Path to Wealth The simple path to wealth - JLCollins

The best ones are of course free, and both this subreddit and bogelheads have a wealth of knowledge. I try and watch a tutorial or read a story a few times a week on both


For how to create and stick to a budget as a young professional, I like Dave Ramsey. He has tons of good rules of thumb and pitfalls to avoid that will be useful for the rest of your life. He's a bit conservative though, and I don't necessarily agree with his cash only, no debt strategies.


https://www.amazon.com/Total-Money-Makeover-Classic-Financial/dp/1595555277/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480449960&sr=8-1&keywords=dave+ramsey


Suze Orman is another great author for younger people, especially when tackling big things for the 1st time like home ownership and loans


https://www.amazon.com/Money-Book-Young-Fabulous-Broke/dp/1594482241/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480450023&sr=8-1&keywords=suze+orman


My top suggestion though is Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It's not as direct as many other personal finance books, as its more general advice on how to steer your financial life, but itss an incredible book


https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612680011/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480450131&sr=8-1&keywords=rich+dad+poor+dad

Glad you read intelligent investor first.

Next is Ben Graham's Security Analysis

This book is really excellent and gets a lot more technical with the numbers.

Read and listen to Dave Ramsey if you want to be "good" with personal finance.

If you want to "optimize" finance, then come hang out with us in r/financialindependence

Podcasts: ChooseFI, Afford Anything

Blogs: Mr. Money Mustache

Books: Simple Path to Wealth, Your Money or Your Life, Millionaire Next Door, The Richest Man in Babylon

​

Some pointers:

1. Don't do what most people do. Chances are, they know less about personal finance than you do.
   
2. Spend based on your value (within your means of course), not based on the percentage of income.
   
3. Don't spend money to impress others.
   
4. If you think 20's is time to spend every penny to have "full" experience, look at this chart.
   
   ​

Doing that job well is not very hard. All the investment advice you'll need fits on a postcard.

>Max your 401k or equivalent employee contribution.
>
>Buy inexpensive, well diversified mutual funds such as Vanguard Target 20XX funds.
>
>Never buy or sell an individual security. The person on the other side of the table knows more than you do about this stuff.
>
>Save 20% of your money.
>
>Pay your credit card balance in full every month.
>
>Maximize tax-advantages savings vehicles like Roth, SEP and 529 accounts.
>
>Pay attention to fees. Avoid actively managed funds.
>
>Make financial advisor commit to a fiduciary standard.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Index-Card-Personal-Complicated/dp/1591847680

Hey dude, kind of in a similar position as you. Started reading about PF a little more than 2 months ago and wish I had started 10 years earlier, haha!

Take some time and read before jumping into anything! Here's what I started with:

Wealthy Barber

then read

Millionaire Teacher

and now I'm working through

Guide to Investing

and

Random Walk Down Wall Street

You will learn a crazy amount about investing with these few books.

I also keep my eye on the RFD Personal Finance forum along with Canadian Money Forums, the latter being a lot more mature.

Cheers!

For an easy way to get started, I suggest you begin with one or two mutual funds, preferably index funds.

Bogel's Little Book of Common Sense Investing is short read and a great introduction to investing with index funds.

Collins The Simple Path to Wealth is another great read for someone getting started in investing. It's based on the Stock Series posts from his blog.

I'm not the guy I believe you're replying to, but I think that /u/nullstring means that once you have a job with a 401k, you'll need to reevaluate which (Roth or 401k) you'll max out first.

This book comes highly recommended here and elsewhere if you're interested in learning more.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0471730335 (second edition here http://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing-Taylor-Larimore/dp/1118921283)

Feel free to pm me if you want.

edit: added second edition

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/099071179X/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I just finished this book and it's outstanding. I couldn't put it down. It's packed with great information and there is even an index of forms in the back to give you an idea/template of what you will need. The author is the guy from the 'bigger pockets' podcast and he covers in good detail what you'll need to know.

Wow you're knowledge is at zero. An RRSP is an investment vehicle, unless it's a special kind offered by a bank you won't even get anything if you let it sit there as cash.

I'd try to explain things but it would take me forever.

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1. Read up on RRSP and TFSA
   
   
2. Realize you need to buy Index Funds or ETFs
   
   
3. Open a brokerage account with Questrade or a bank.
   
   .
   
   To get the above answered I recommend looking through this sub or buying this book (It's not mine but it is very easy to read in a weekend and gives you an explanation for everything).
   
   http://www.amazon.ca/Value-Simple-Practical-Complexity-Investing/dp/0987818910/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1420877097&sr=8-2&keywords=simple+investing
   
   

This question has been a lot answered a lot — you should check the sidebar.

That said, the boring but generally good advice is to first save up an emergency fund large enough pay for three months of your life with no other income during that period before you start investing. A lot of people say 10k is a good round number for that fund, but it'll obviously vary from person to person.

Once you have that, you should check out Robinhood. It gets a lot of flak on reddit because it gives people who might have no idea what they are doing a lot of power to blow all their money on penny stocks and emotion. While most other brokerages will charge you $8 - $10 for every trade, Robinhood charges nothing. That saves you a lot, especially if you're starting out with a relatively low portfolio value, but it also means you have to hold your emotions in check on your own, since commission fees won't be there to do it for you.

Vanguard offers a great variety of ETFs, many of which are available on Robinhood. You should check out that list.

I'd also advise you read at least one book. I really like A Random Walk Down Wall Street. I'll spoil the ending for you: It's really hard to beat the market. But it's not so hard to match it.

If you like to read I have read a few books that have quickly made me realize that most people do not need a financial adviser.

Here are my top 3:

A simple path to wealth: https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Path-Wealth-financial-independence/dp/1533667926/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511905350&sr=8-1&keywords=the+simple+path+to+wealth

I will teach you to be Rich: https://www.amazon.com/Will-Teach-You-Be-Rich/dp/0761147489/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511905370&sr=1-1&keywords=I+will+teach+you+to+be+rich

The little book to common sense investing: https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense-Investing/dp/1119404509/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511905385&sr=1-1&keywords=the+little+book+to+common+sense+investing

The best two books anyone worth their salt would recommend are The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis....in that order.

I'm halfway through A Random Walk Down Wall Street. It is fairly easy to read and seems to cover all the common investment strategies. If you're thinking about long term investing you should check it out.

The author contends that the best performing investment strategy over long periods (such as 30 years) is a widely diversified portfolio that covers the entire market (e.g. index fund). Frontline aired an episode last year that came to the same conclusion. Mutual funds have management fees that reduce your gains. Fund performance will vary over time as the market changes (and fund management changes).

Another thing to consider is tax; you will pay capitol gains tax in the year you sell (15% of sale $ - buy $). Purchasing another stock does not get you out of this.

Yes it is. I will not do the explanation justice so below is a link to JL Collins book A Simple Path To Wealth where he dives into the market trends.

The short answer is that the market always goes up. If you search for a graph of the stock market showing the last 100 years, while there are a few periods where you see some big dips, over the long run it always head higher.

Check out this book... it’s worth every penny!

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Path-Wealth-financial-independence/dp/1533667926

The number of great books to be read on business itself is beyond enumerable. There is even a book on the 100 best business books written here: http://100bestbiz.com/

For helping your brother decide whether he has the stomach and skills it takes to be an entrepreneur, I'd suggest Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki and Founders at Work

At the end of the day, it's a bipolar ride that I'm not sure any book can prepare you for...

Two books that would be pretty good starting points (and a 3rd book for extra measure):

The first book you wanna pay special attention to Chapter 8 and Chapter 20, but read it ALL:

https://www.amazon.com/intelligent-investor-book-practical-counsel/dp/0060115912/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1557126552&sr=1-7

This one is more detialed

https://www.amazon.com/Security-Analysis-Foreword-Buffett-Editions/dp/0071592539/ref=pd_rhf_eeolp_s_pd_crcd__4/143-0942938-6072313?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0071592539&pd_rd_r=98601957-062a-4d2b-b4e5-10c14a0c824b&pd_rd_w=EmVty&pd_rd_wg=tAgWo&pf_rd_p=36c62ed8-9692-4b91-aa9a-c4b3b85cc759&pf_rd_r=XJ4NTWQMJ5KPRKTHCEZT&psc=1&refRID=XJ4NTWQMJ5KPRKTHCEZT

This third book isn't "reuired reading" but wouldn't be a bad idea to read---it teaches a healthy degree of cynicism about the things you read in financial reports and the things CEOs will tell you on TV---like CNBC etc

https://www.amazon.com/Fooling-People-Complete-Updated-Epilogue/dp/0470481544/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=david+einhorn&qid=1557126776&s=books&sr=1-2

GOOD LUCK!!!!!

In my personal opinion, Jason Kelly's book linked below was a great Stock Market 101 book, very easy to read:

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0452298628/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_6KEpDbFEAJ12Z

I highly recommend it!

A lot of people downvoting renting and saying getting a mortgage is a sound personal finance decision need to wake up. Here is an amoritzation schedule on a 30 year $160,000 loan (loan amount after 20% down on a $200k house; a decent house in the midwest) with a 3.8% interest rate. You wind up paying $108k in interest. You do not make money on a property you are living in. You barely wind up paying more on the principal than you do in interest 12 years into the loan.

Golgatem has no fucking clue what they are talking about and apparently also does not have the faintest idea of the "true" costs of home ownership are. The reason so many people lost their homes in the real estate crash/recession was because they approached things the way Golgatem did. Get your heads out of your asses and stop thinking just because you were born in 'Murica you're entitled to a nice house with a picket fence. You should be aiming to have a positive net worth not renting a bunch of shit from the bank.

I would recommend you check out Get a Finance Life: Personal Finance in your 20s and 30.

I enjoyed the book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. It's not entirely apropos your interests, but I think you will find it agreeably skeptical about the prevailing economic mumbo-jumbo. Steven Landsburg's The Armchair Economist is another easy, thought-provoking read. I have not read it, but I am curious about More Heat than Light ("Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics ").

A Random Walk Down Wall Street directly contradicts The Intelligent Investor.

I'd like to recommend another book, more advanced than The Intelligent Investor. Security Analysis.

I thought the pronunciation was very clear! And thank you, adding to Overcast by feed url worked.

I just finished JL Collins book The Simple Path to Wealth before this one and highly recommend his stuff as well. The book is largely pulled from the content of his blog posts.

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Path-Wealth-financial-independence/dp/1533667926

Here are the first two I read to get you started, I'll see if I can't dif up the others:

• The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need
  
• The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness
  
  
  And yes, I opened up my Roth through Vanguard which was super easy!

Great job! Now go read this book, open a Roth IRA at Vanguard, and auto invest into VTSAX Mutual Fund for the next 40 years, and you will be unfathomably rich. Dont bother with bonds, simply VTSAX and maybe a spinkle 10% at most of VTIAX for some international companies.

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https://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing-Taylor-Larimore/dp/1118921283/ref=sr_1_3?crid=1WLP27B3ZCKPW&keywords=bogleheads+guide+to+investing&qid=1565873408&s=gateway&sprefix=bogleheads+retirement%2Caps%2C138&sr=8-3

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https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

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https://www.reddit.com/r/Bogleheads/

Sounds like a great father, he is working to build a desirable habit in you real early. But really your investing will start once you have regular income.

> Any sources to learn about such stuff?

Too many sources to mention. The book, The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham continues to be a gold standard. But it is pretty wordy and difficult for the first timer. Rich Dad, Poor Dad is exciting to read but very shallow and even misleading. Most of these books use the American market in perspective.

The Four Pillars of Investing. Great book for beginners!