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Originally Posted by Dating Specialist  Throw me a book or anything related to dating and love I'd devour it with fervour. But financials & investments? Duh.. |
I'm in the same boat with anything about people. Who cares what some dead dude did 100 years ago? Why should it matter to me
at all what the 20-30-year-old dating scene looks like? But give me a book on business and I'm happy for hours. So let's swap.
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Does anyone have ant good suggestions to help me get motivated to learn about this subject matter and execute them?
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What's true is, you don't HAVE to be an expert to have a good, secure financial situation. I'm sure there are TONS of nuances you could discuss about relationships that I couldn't even comprehend, and yet I still managed to get married. Similarly, you don't need to understand all the technical stuff I have in my head in order to have good finances. You just have to know the basics. And thanks to technology, the basics can usually be implemented in a totally brainless way.
Basic 1: Spend less than you make Trust me; you'll never get rich by spending more money than you have. If you're a typical employee with a fixed paycheck that comes every month, this is easy. Figure out how much you get, and figure out how to spend less than that.
The 60% solutions is a brilliantly easy way to spend less than you earn without having to spend days building a budget and track to the penny where all your money goes.
If you're self-employed, get paid on commission, or otherwise have a variable paycheck, it's harder, but figure out your averages and build a cash reserve.
PM me if you want the spreadsheet I use for this.
Basic 2: Pay yourself first This is in large part related to #1; if you put money where you don't see it on a daily basis and can't get to it easily, you don't spend it. Set up your bank to automatically transfer money to savings every month; ask your investment companies to put you on auto-deposit (they're always happy to take your money.) For reasons unknown to humankind and utterly inexplicable to math majors, if you spend money and save what's left, you never have any left to save. But if you save money and then spend what's left, you have no difficulty meeting your financial needs with the smaller amount of money. WTF?
I don't know. But it works.
Richest Man In Babylon is a great resource for this.
Basic 3: Use that money to do useful things This is where we start to differ between people who like this stuff and people who don't. I use my savings to invest in real estate, and as seed capital to start my own business. My step-grandfather-in-law uses it to buy and sell stocks. We both get a kick out of what we do, and consider it valuable use of our time. It works for us.
But there's no reason
you have to do this. This plan works just as well:
- Put your short-term savings in a savings account at the bank or a CD.
- Put your long-term savings in a money market account (we keep ours in Paypal, which pays us ~4%, keeps us from spending it because it's not in the bank account, but allows us to get it in 3-4 days if necessary.)
- Put your retirment savings in an index fund.
- Set up all of these on auto-pay so that you don't have to do anything to keep them up-to-date.
- File your monthly statements in a drawer.
- Ignore them until you're 55 or so.