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I'm the same. I guess for me, understanding the fundamentals of personal finance was the most important step. Understanding the time value of money, compounding
by NoLinkToMe 3y ago
I'm the same. I guess for me, understanding the fundamentals of personal finance was the most important step. Understanding the time value of money, compounding returns, the power of allocating a portion of your income to investments, basic tax optimisations that most countries tax policies offer through tax benefits on retirement accounts and home ownership etc.
Once you see the power of these things and combine them, taking the right decisions actually becomes quite simple.
For example, if you take a 7% average long-term return, as a rule of thumb, your money doubles every 10 years. (1.07^10 = 2, more or less). That means if you save $1k at 25yo, in 40 years you'd have 4 doublings, or 16k, at age 65. That's a pretty powerful multiplier. And 7% is roughly the long-term inflation-adjusted (real) return on the S&P500 (no guarantees it holds, of course).
Many companies will 100% match your retirement investments. So if you put in 1k at age 25, a 100% match will mean your employer puts in 1k as well. Combined with the above, the $16k would become $32k.
Now, if you instead took the $1k as salary, you'd have paid income tax at the marginal rate, a 30% marginal rate is quite common. i.e. the $1k in salary would've netted you $700 in spending at age 25. By instead putting it in your 401k, it'd grow out to $32k in the above example at age 65, or 45 as much. If you moved at that age to a state with no income tax (there's 8), you'd net it all. For every $1 you put in, you'd have gained $45.
That's such a crazy multiplier, and note it's already inflation-adjusted. For 1 unit of work/time, you gained 45 units of work/time. Take such a multiplier in the context of retirement: 40 hours (= 1 week) of work would allow you 45 weeks (almost a year) of earlier retirement.
These simple fundamentals explain why starting early on personal finance is helpful. But it also explains why it's completely unnecessary to spend decades looking at a graph/UI of all of this unfolding, once a week, and updating the planning.
In fact, the only thing I really did after a lot of personal finance education, was to set-up some automated contributions to investment / retirement accounts from my salary. Every few years I reconsider the balance between 'pleasure today' vs 'pleasure one day' (i.e. retirement), and rebalance how much of my income I spend, and how much I allocate to these automatic contributions. It takes about 30 minutes a year to make these arrangements, and with that the vast majority of my personal finance arrangements are made. That's why additional tooling isn't really necessary. Of course at some point some analysis will be useful before pulling the trigger on retirement, and some analysis/advise is useful around major decisions like a house purchase, or selling your company. But for the most part, financial planning tools are just really unnecessary because the fundamentals for an ordinary person to arrange are so, so simple: allocate a portion of your income towards tax-optimised investment/retirement accounts, and set-up automatic payments.