AskMenOver30

The same boring-ass advice you’ve been hearing and reading since forever is right.

Save for a “rainy day.” Get a new job with better pay and benefits? Save a bunch of that money. Don’t go buying toys. You don’t know if your car’s going to quit, get in a wreck, need a home repair, or hurt yourself and need days off to recover. You also don’t know if your job will go TU for whatever reason leaving you scrambling to find a new job. Save up, then buy a toy after you’ve got a cushion.

Take care of yourself. It’s a royal pain in the ass and is orders of magnitude harder to undo damage you’ve done to yourself as you get older - if it’s even possible. Alcohol abuse, overweight, etc. will shorten your life and hold you back. IDK what is going on with these guys that are 40 and complain about aches and pains. I’m way past 40 and have none of those problems, but I’m also not overweight and do my best to visit the gym regularly.

Use a condom. STIs and unwanted pregnancies. The first you can hopefully fix with meds. If you can’t, like AIDS, you’ll have to tell every potential partner forever, and you’ll lose a bunch if them that won’t want to risk it. The second is a lifetime that will forever attach you to the kid and the mom (or the dad), like it or not, and complicate your life inescapably if a marriage isn’t viable or lasting.

Don’t get complacent. If you’re not where you want to be and you have the desire and opportunity to move up, do it. Every year you spend earning less that what you can is hundreds of thousands of dollars missed out on in interest, wages, and retirement savings at the end of your career. Potentially millions.

IDK what the future holds for the markets and if they’ll still be a viable method of retirement investment, but for now it seems to be. The best advice I ever got is invest in index funds, use dollar cost averaging, and do not fuck with your money. The first is self explanatory. Index funds are self-cleaning (poor performers are removed and better performers added), so you don’t have to deal with managing it. Second, keep adding money, regularly, even when the market is down. When it’s down, the stocks are “on sale”. Buy more. However, you cannot time the market, so don’t try to wait for lows to buy in. Third, don’t fuck with your money. Don’t take it out when it’s going down, don’t try to time a rally, and most of all, don’t pay any manager to do this stuff for you because you’ll end up paying capital gains and transaction fees wiping out a chunk of your gains. Once your money is in, don’t fuck with it, especially when the market is down. You’ll pay taxes on losses and fees on the changes. Shooting yourself in the foot. Stay away from individual stocks like Tesla or Apple.