Take 10% of any money that you receive and put it somewhere safe and where it takes real effort to get it back out. Then don't touch it unless your need is truly dire.
The idea is that regardless of your income level, you can almost certainly live on 10% less without a substantial hit to your standard of living, so pay it to Future You. The earlier in life you start, the better.
This did not become true for me until my very late 20s, and by that point I was so well adapted to living on the edge, in a world which offered no end of surprising new ways to knock my financial situation out from under me, that it took years more before I started to see any value in planning for anything more than a couple months away.
What is even "safe" these days? ETFs? Treasury bonds?
There's also plenty of books out there on people skills. 99% of them are rubbish but a few have stood the test of time, e.g. the Dale Carnegie books.
Value real life world experience less than college? Not compatible, move on.
Twenty years ago I tried to start using Python. I tried to make a sniffer in Python - a program for logging data on the network. But this program returned an error. I started to figure it out, I found that the error was in the Python implementation. I then rewrote this program in C - it worked very reliably. Since then I have avoided using Python. For the last five years I have been doing research on writing effective programs. I have used C and even made a framework for it, but programming remains difficult under time constraints. Then I tried to make a prototype in Python. In one day I tested several ideas. I can say that I like writing in Python. I plan to make a translator for automatically rewriting programs from Python to C. I plan to test ideas in Python and then rewrite them in C.
Fifteen years ago, I made my own website and came up with a digital currency for it. These were PNG files with watermarks, with my money drawn on them. They were similar to the ones I printed at school with my friends. They were called "CHATL". At school, I didn't know how to give my money value, it turns out it had to be lent. Returning to PNG files, they could be viewed on a computer screen, printed and uploaded to a website to put into an account. But I couldn't solve the problem of simultaneous ownership. Such money turned out to be disposable. At that time, I had heard about Bitcoin, knew that it was worth about a dollar, but I didn't attach much importance to it. Besides, in Russia, I didn't have a dollar bank card to pay abroad. It's funny that the same thing is happening now, we have blocked international bank cards and I use Bitcoin.
sleepyguy•9mo ago