#Money

Part III in a series of posts on getting started on financial independence and resiliency. The initial impetus for this came from COVID Career Advice . The first post in the series focusing on making yourself resilient is Getting Started on Financial Independence: Financial Resiliency .

Part II focused on getting started growing your assets and investing once you’ve sorted your basic financial hygiene out.

This post focuses on moving into slightly more advanced investment topics and strategy around building your portfolio.

Part II in a series of posts on getting started on financial independence and resiliency. The initial impetus for this came from COVID Career Advice . The first post in the series focusing on making yourself resilient is Getting Started on Financial Independence: Financial Resiliency .

This post focuses on getting started growing your assets and investing once you’ve sorted your basic financial hygiene out . Please read that and go through the 80/20 exercise and assessment if you are not in a position of setting aside 10-20% of your take home for financial growth every month.

My COVID Career Advice post had a key section on making yourself financially independent. It was more popular than I would have guessed and spawned backchannel chats with people on how best to get started on financially resiliency. This post is a round up of the advice I’ve given people who asked. YMMV. Nothing in here is rocket science, though it requires a commitment, some setup, and some habits (or discipline) around taking your financial health seriously. Behaviour change is key.

The Financial Independence portion of my COVID career advice post was surprisingly popular. I’ve received a lot of other questions about more easy rules for getting to FI and money advice.

The ironclad law of taking care of yourself financially is you must spend less than what you earn.

Whether salaries, assets, dividends, and interest - that is your upper ceiling (Credit is not earnings. It is simply a way to move future earnings into the present by incurring cost to consume things ie. interest rate charges.).

Tracking finances and budgeting is unsexy but is the base from which flows investing, capital, and wise use of credit. It clarifies activity, priorities, obligations, and opportunities. Making money work for you is a minor superpower. It, if you can excuse the pun, pays dividends.

And it makes most sense in your hands, rather than a SaaS or bank. Many apps and online services give financial visibility but ultimately tie you to a (paid) upgrade cycle, ecosystem, or upsell where you lack control of your financial data and insights. Most make it difficult to get your data out once it’s theirs.

Well, since I don’t really ever plan to retire like a normal person, this may not be applicable, but apparently the [million dollars to retire goal] (https://www.thestreet.com/retirement/1-million-doesnt-cut-it-for-retirement-10701792 ) is no longer applicable according to most financial analysts. People in my age bracket should be looking to double retirement savings to $2M (Gen X::27-42). 22% of advisors suggested $3M.

Apparently, the blame lies with these online retirement calculators that often assume you’ll need 70%-80% of your work life income.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Warren Buffet as a businessman (even though I’m not personally thrilled at a lot of the companies or industries he invests in). Besides coining my favourite quote about the entire sub-prime Wall Street fiasco, I think his shareholder letters are a study in clear, concise communication to people with honesty, integrity and directness.

His latest shareholder annual shareholder letter is a study in how to plainly deliver bad financial news and still find a silver lining (like the others they’ve been writing).

I have to admit I am pretty impressed at the number of educational videos that have been created to explain to people what actually happened with the mortgage-backed securities crisis and how it affects everyone.

And Part II of the video .