Financial Tips for Success

living the rich life

11 Apr 2024

If I had ever had to give one piece of financial advice to someone, I would probably link them to r/personalfinance. It’s mainly US centric, so I’m not sure how well it applies internationally, but the main idea of switching to a long term strategy instead of a short term strategy is the key to success. You aren’t going to be rich overnight.

Being rich can mean different things to different people. The key to success is how you define it. If you want lambos and mansions or want to work on open source, make a long term plan to get there.

The following is a mostly a summary of “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” by Ramit Sethi. Tacky name, great advice. Any unknown terms should be searched up on investopedia.com. This post is just to get you exposed to the lingo and you can do a deep dive into any terms you don’t understand by yourself.

Handling the Banks

Beating the Banks

Earnings Breakdown

Note: I don’t follow this section at all, however, I thought it would be beneficial for those that need it

Investing

Don’t just skip to this part you lousy bum.

Misc

My Strategy

Sometimes it’s helpful to see how other people’s plan are just to get a sense on what to do. Here’s mine.

Goals

My goal is to work on FOSS full time. I value my time more than any worldly possession. That’s why I’m aiming for Lean FIRE.

Strategy

I aim to max out my HSA, Roth IRA, and Roth 401(k). I also aim to have them all in a mix of VOO and QQQ. I have a checking account and a brokerage account. I have 3 months worth of emergency funds in my checking account. Any extra income I get fills up my emergency fund, and the rest go into the brokerage account. If there is an unlikely emergency where even my emergency funds run out, I’ll tap into my HSA, Roth IRA, and Roth 401(k) before tapping into my brokerage account, since you can take out the distributions you put in. For credit cards, I have a simple 2% cash back on everything, and a rewards card. I might get into churnning at some point.

This is how I automate it. Money should flow automatically into the checking account. Before going into my checking account, a little is taken from my paycheck for taxes, 401k and HSA. For my Roth IRA, I setup a system that automatically takes from my checking account. Credit cards also pull from my checking account. Anything extra in the checking account goes into my brokerage account (Done manually).

That’s it!

My View On Finances

Hopefully this was easy to understand. Unfortunately the education system doesn’t teach the basics, so I had to go out of my way to learn about this. If a population doesn’t know how to invest for their future, wouldn’t that make them bitter?

Honestly, a better way to do finances would be to guarantee the basics. Healthcare, food, water, and shelter should be guaranteed for everyone. You could also argue that education, electricity, the internet, and at least one electronic device should be in that list. Anything extra should be done the clasic capitalist way. But a universal social saftey net would guarantee the livelihoods of everyone and lead to a more productive society. UBI could be the best first step we can take towards this goal. The problem is, as a nation, do we want to do that?

Finally, I don’t think it’s fair to make money using money. It defeats the purpose on working hard to get ahead. Funds, like the Medallion Fund, and billionaires should not exist in a fair world.

Futhermore, 10% of Americans own ~90% of stock source 1 source 2. 1% of Americans have 16x more wealth than the bottom 50% source.

2024-06-10 EDIT

Ramit has uploaded a pretty good summary of his book here