Unless you live alone in the wilderness, money is part of your life. Despite its omnipresence, most people are financially illiterate. While I have no formal financial training or certifications beyond completing an actuarial class in college, I am highly financially literate. My knowledge comes from consuming far too many books, blog posts, videos, podcasts, presentations, and having one-on-one conversations with financial advisors.

I have long passed the point of diminishing returns consuming financial information such that 99% of what I read/hear I'm reading/hearing for the 99th time. I am a weirdo. The average person doesn't learn about taxes for fun.

There's a reason for this: finances are somewhat complicated and take some math. There's also not one right answer for everyone on many personal finance questions; your values and life circumstances determine the correct thing to do.

I think it's all less complicated than the average person realizes, but they’re still too complicated to fully communicate everything you need to know in a single blog post. I could and will give some rules of thumb, but they'll only take you so far.

As I see it, you have two options:

1. Find a trustworthy accredited financial advisor who charges appropriate fees and heavily lean on them to guide your financial life. Or
2. Immerse yourself into the world of personal finance education resources, figure things out for yourself once you’ve learned enough to make good decisions.

Of course, a mix of the two is the best way to go. I have spoken with financial advisors, and they are helpful, but I lean much more towards option two because understanding how everything works myself makes me feel much more confident and secure in my decisions.

I have consumed hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours of personal finance content. However, I think 80% of the knowledge I gained came from the first 10 hours or so - Pareto principal applies here. You don't need to immerse yourself into this world nearly as much as I have.

I was also fortunate enough to be lucky enough to not have my first exposure to personal finance content be malicious or incompetent. That’s certainly not the case for everyone. When you're inexperienced, you can't distinguish grifters from genuine actors.

So, here's what I'll do for you,

• I'll give you my take on a slice the landscape of personal finance resources out there. Who's trustworthy, who's a grifter, who's good for beginners, and what to graduate to once you have the basics down. Immerse yourself with them for a few weeks, and you'll get most of the personal finance knowledge you'll need.
• Then I'll leave you with my rules of thumb I follow in my own life. I'm a young guy with no dependents, so if you're in a different spot, they might not apply to you.

Square One

If you have no financial knowledge at all, I recommend reading the book or listening to the audiobook for The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Colins. There are many excellent personal finance books (and at least a few bad ones), but The Simple Path to Wealth is the best of any book I've read for beginners. My first financial book was the also great, The Wealthy Barber by David Chilton.

If you don't like reading, you should work on that. But in the meantime, Two Cents is probably the best resource I've found for personal finance in terms of accessibility for beginners and trustworthiness.

I used to be a big Money Guy Show fan, and I still think they're still approachable, trustworthy and give good advice. I listened to every episode they put out for two years. However, the started putting ads in their podcast feed and they've done some collaborations with people I think are kind of yucky, so I stopped tuning in. I also think you probably shouldn't become a client of their Abound Wealth management company that the show exists to funnel people into. It isn't a scam to be clear; I fully believe they'll give you great advice and management. It's all fee based which is good: they don't earn any commission from getting you to buy anything. The fees they charge are just way higher than I'd ever be willing to pay for a financial advisor.

I can recommend The Plain Bagel without any reservations. He makes his videos approachable even when tackling complicated topics. But if you want more pragmatic advice, you'll need to look into his backlog because his recent videos are mostly explainers of broad global trends. He is Canadian, so some of his advice doesn't apply to Americans like me. Also, his videos are focused on investing - which is an important subset of personal finance - but it's not the whole picture.

All these folks have financial planning certifications, which means they've met education and experience requirements. They're also more liable if they say incorrect things. This is important, and you should be more wary of people who don't have any certifications.

That's where the official recommendations for beginners end from me though. Here are the bullet points on other beginner tier people you may have heard of:

• Ramit Sethi's advice as far I've seen is solid. He doesn't have any relevant certifications though and all the ads in his stuff gives me the ick.
• Graham Stephan's thumbnails and titles are horrific, he's worked with some really bad advertisers, and he doesn't have any financial planning certifications. But as bad as the vibes are, most of what he says in his main channel videos are fine as far as I've seen.
• Gordon Ramsey gives bad advice. He has no certifications. I haven't seen much of his stuff, but I see no reason to trust him.
• Caleb Hammer is slop.

Anyone on TikTok or Instagram is not to be trusted. Those platforms are even more infested with dreck than YouTube, which is already bad.

Beyond the Basics

If you read The Simple Path to Wealth or listen to a good bunch of Two Cents or Money Guy videos for a few weeks, I honestly think you're probably good to go if you have no interest in learning more. If you're excited about learning more, there are plenty of others I can recommend to you though.

Ben Felix is probably my favorite financial advice guy. He's extremely knowledgeable and is fantastic about citing studies. He mostly focuses on investing, but he covers a wide variety of topics. His most of his YouTube channel is too complicated for the average person though. His podcast, The Rational Reminder, takes it even further with even more details but also more complexity.

If you immerse yourself enough in the personal finance world, you'll probably start hearing about FIRE (Or just FI more often these days). It's not for everyone, but if it piques your interest, I like the Mad Fientist's and Mr. Money Mustache's blogs the most. I like the ChooseFI podcast too. I find that folks in those circles are generally give better advice than the average internet commentator, but most of them don't have certifications and are just regular people giving their takes so tread with caution.

My Thoughts

There are many people online with big conflicts of interest, knowledge/experience mismatched to their confidence, or are outright trying to maliciously scam their audience. Yes, you shouldn't blindly do what I tell you to do either - go double check anything I tell you here and you find I'm not going to say anything too controversial.

If you’re not interested in looking at anything else, here’s my beginner basic advice that’ll work for everyone:

• Finding a job you don’t hate that pays decently is the bedrock of your finances. Work hard to get this.
• Treat debt carefully:
  • Never carry a balance on credit cards.
  • Be very careful when buying a car with a loan. People can trick themselves into buying more than they can afford by looking at only the monthly payment and not what it will cost over the long term.
  • And you don’t need to take out a mortgage to be financially successful. Renting is the right financial decision often.
• Save money for the future! Do this by taking advantage of tax advantaged accounts (such as IRAs or 401ks) you’re eligible for and setting up automatic savings contributions. If you have no idea how much to save, 10% of your income is a good place to start.
• You should probably invest your savings you won't need soon.

Unfortunately, that's all I'm comfortable saying that'll apply to anyone reading this. Everyone's life circumstances are different, so any specific advice would be the wrong thing to do for a significant number of readers. (This is a big part of why you hear a lot of "this is not specific financial advice" even from honest accredited financial professionals.)

If you're a novice at this stuff, you probably have a lot of questions like,

• "Why is investing so important?"
• "How do I invest my money?"
• "How can I tell what's a good investment?"
• "What should I invest in?"

And again, I unfortunately don't want to give a straight answer to those questions because the answer really depends on details specific to you. I'll instead discuss how I would answer those questions for myself - not that you should copy me - but so you can get an idea of how to think through the questions for yourself.

I'd rather invest my money than leave it in my bank account. Returns from investing can outpace inflation and earn more money on top of that without me needing to work. I'm young, have a comfortable financial buffer, and don't have any dependents, so I have a high risk tolerance. I invest most of my money though Vanguard, not because their investment offerings are drastically better than competitors like Fidelity or Schwab, but because their unique ownership structure makes me confident they'll always give me as good a deal as they can.

I invest the vast majority of my money in passively managed market index fund ETFs (not that there's anything wrong with mutual funds, in practice they preform about the same). That's because I believe it's not possible for individual investors to consistently beat the market, and I'd rather just match the returns of the market at the minimum cost.

My money is mostly in the Vanguard ETFs VTI, and VXUS. VTI is an index of the United States market, and VXUS is an index of the rest of the world's market. I could quibble about the specifics of the balance between the two of them, but it doesn't really matter.

I also have some home equity, but I don't think it makes me too much better off than when I was renting. I had to sell a bunch of my investments to afford the down payment - and now I'm missing out on the returns those investments would have generated. It'll probably end up worth it financially if I stay at my current place for at least 5 years.

If anything about that didn't make sense or if my life situation sounds significantly different from yours, please don't copy me. Your needs are probably different, and a plan fitted to your life experiences will be the way to go.