this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
106 points (95.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43958 readers
1482 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Have an emergency fund and pay yourself first.
The emergency fund comes first $1000 or 6 months expenses tends to be the sweet spot. It keeps you from taking on bad debt like credit cards and pay day loans. 5% of your paycheck is a good place to get started, that's usually enough to build up funds fairly quickly without hurting too much.
Retirement doesn't have to be a ton of money each pay check, especially if you start early in life, but if you ever want to retire you have to start as soon as possible because the later you start the more money you have to put away. Take the company match on a 401(k) or 5-20% of your paycheck. Invest in a target date fund or S&P 500, Russell 2000 fund, or whole market fund (and look at the expense ratio, you want that to be as low as possible) and call it a day. Individual stocks are for suckers, but if you want to gamble with individual stocks use 1-5% of your portfolio to do it so it's not the end of the world if you pick a loser.
Finding your target for retirement is a big step to knowing what you need to save early. Play around with some retirement calculators and debt payoff calculators fairly often as your target number may change based on your lifestyle.
Did you get this from The Richest Man in Babylon? I just quoted another part of that book for this thread. That's one of the core lessons of that book.
Probably, I've read it before.
I couldn't tell you the original statement. It's an extremely popular saying among financial advice people.