I honestly don’t know very much about investing, but I do know it’s important. If you don’t invest your money at all, you’re just leaving free money on the table (from interest) while the money you do have loses value (due to inflation). To be clear, I’m not the type to “grind” to be one of those Financially Independent Retire Early (FIRE) people, I would just like to retire eventually. Other than that, I have no interest in learning more about taxes, stocks, bonds or economics.
Fortunately for me, you don’t have to be a genius to invest wisely, you just have to know you aren’t one.
The main mistake people make when investing is thinking that they can outperform the stock market by choosing their own stocks and doing (hopefully) some research. This is the legendary mode difficulty. And honestly, the stock market is a lot closer to gambling than a game a skill since there are so many hidden variables at play (Exhibit A: the Michael Reeves YouTube video where his goldfish outperforms human investors on reddit).
The safest and most sure-fire way to not lose money in the stock market is to buy index funds and then hold on to them. For years. Many years. Never selling anything. Just waiting for interest, and the market to do its thing until you are ready to retire. It’s boring, and maybe that’s for the best. And importantly for me, it means I don’t have to think about it often, if at all.
Of course, there’s a lot more to investing than just retirement and retirement accounts, but I don’t know as much about good strategies for those. I personally use Betterment and their robo-investor for my personal finance, since I can’t be bothered to choose or buy stocks on my own.
Then there can sometimes be RSUs and other weird stuff to learn about on top of all of that! Luckily, I recently found a website/github repo (powersover.com) that explained what I should do with my RSUs in a way I could understand: sell them immediately. This website also has a lot of the above investing advice (explained at a level for beginners, like me, to understand) and more. So if you’re a new-grad, or a new investor, perhaps you will find it as useful as I did.
And once the robots take over, we won’t ever have to think about investing again!