I'm approaching age 50 and just started investing, and I'm kicking myself on discovering how little I knew and how no one taught me anything and I didn't know to ask regarding personal finance. I opened a Roth IRA when I was 31 but had no real understanding of how it worked, and so when the global financial crisis hit and I started really struggling financially, I stopped making contributions. The account languished unmanaged in some high-fee fund-of-funds; meanwhile I foolishly thought that someone was managing it as it did grow somewhat. I'm just wondering how on earth I never talked money with friends; I have no idea whether I'm alone in being middle-aged and only just now starting to invest; and I'm informed and educated in so many other areas so I'm baffled how I ended up so clueless in this one.
Now I'm learning all about ETFs and setting money aside to invest; I just opened a HYSA and made more in interest in half a month than I have made in 15 years of keeping a checking and savings account in a commercial bank. Where was a knowledge of HYSA earlier in my life?
I guess I'm hoping to hear I'm not alone in getting this late start, and also curious how I ended up with such a serious gap in personal finance knowledge and whether anyone else discovered they knew almost nothing and had to make up for lost time.
How did you learn about personal finance? Through friends, your parents taught you from an early age, from reading books?
byu/wildmind1721 inpersonalfinance
Posted by wildmind1721
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My parents were at least pretty good about saving and being frugal, and they instilled some good ideas in me early.
Then in high school (freshman year?) I took a “personal finance” course and learned basically everything I needed to know for the basics. After that… Reddit.
Suze Orman’s call-in show on cable TV. I loved her Can I Afford It segments and I learned a lot from her lessons.
I changed jobs and my income doubled, so I started searching on YouTube (which is scary and risky already), it then really took off with books. Books are great but the drawback is when laws change and inflation happens, then the information is outdated. As long as you keep that in mind about specific numbers having updated since then they are absolutely still relevant.
This sub, videos on YouTube, and other sources to generally verify what I was seeing.
I majored in finance as well which was a help
I stumbled on r/personalfinance back in 2017 when I was still in the Marines.
I actually still vividly remember being on duty at the barracks at 3am and trying to figure out how do pay down a NMCS loan. Completely changed my life.
I’ve thought about this a lot but I genuinely can’t remember. I don’t recall talking to my parents about it, and I certainly never learned about it in school. I know when I opened my Vanguard account in my 20s I went straight to a S&P index fund, but I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t remember discussing it with anyone or doing any research. Maybe it was just the first thing that came up on Vanguard. When I opened IRAs, it was in Target Date funds because that seemed like the default option.
That got me all the way to my late 30s, when I ran into the concept of FIRE and realized I was almost at a plausible early retirement number. At that point I started learning about more specific things relevant to early retirement, mostly from a mix of Bogleheads, Reddit, and random googling. I’m now retired in my early 40s.
I’m glad I started to invest at a time when the internet had already matured (online banking/low-cost investing being easily accessible) but modern social media did not yet exist. That was the sweet spot imo. The era of online convenience had begun, but the post-truth era of systematic misinformation and grifting was not yet upon us. Kids and young adults growing up now are at a massive disadvantage. There is much more information now… and most of it is both bad *and* actively trying to exploit them.
Kiplinger’s and Money magazine in the early 1990s
There are plenty of personal finance 101 going through the basics and then you can deep dive each topic. Then you retain the knowledge by doing it. How do I invest? Open an account put in $100. What does this term means? Google / Youtube it. Be skeptical but be curious. I didn’t know what a CD is or if it’s a good investment so I put in $5,000 which at the time had a 4.5% return. I ended up making more putting it into SP500 index so I stopped doing CD all together. Trial and error. Biggest advice is NEVER BORROW MONEY to do any of this. If you lose $100, then that’s all you will lose.
Think short term, medium term, and then long term. What do I do if I need the money days, weeks, months, and years from now. All of that will lead you to learn about checking, HYSA, CD’s, 401k & IRA (Roth vs non-roth). Then you go down the rabbit hole of pros & cons of each and so on. It’s all on the Internet. Couple of my friends enter the labor force 1 or 2 years ahead of me which threw out these terms as they were also discovering them. So I went to learn about them while I was still in college.
If something is too good to be true it’s most likely a scam. If someone tells you a single stock 1000x their investment ask why didn’t they put in the initial gain a second time to get a 1,000,000x ? Ask why if they are that rich and it is that easy why are they charging a $30 course (hint: they make more money selling the course).
I attributed my spending habits to my frugal parents. I guess growing up poor has its merit, you penny pinch on everything which carried over into my adulthood. I only spend where it maximizes return which gave me a lot of spare cash to invest.
You’re definitely not alone in this. I started learning in my early 40s. My first consistent job was the catalyst. I’d been freelance and just paycheck to paycheck up until the. So when I started making a reliable income I started investigating.
I found Tori Dunlap/ Her First 100k to be super helpful. It’s all the foundational stuff you need to learn and it’s a great community.
My parents guided me young and bailed me appropriately with lessons as a young adult. Solid training in the nuance
Honestly, from the CFO at my first adult job. She was basically retired, but came to help out one of her friends, who co-founded the company. There were a bunch of us in our very early 20s, and she basically sat us down and explained compound interest, tax deferral, index funds, stock options, TDFs, all the stuff I’d never heard of growing up.
She’s the reason I had a 401k when I was 21, and bought a house when I was 25.
My older brother when I was in my early twenties. My parents were never great with money and didn’t teach us anything about personal finance. I was very lucky my brother planted the seed early and fortunately I took it seriously and learned more specifics on my own. Books, YouTube, podcasts etc
Definitely not parents. Mostly by reading and listening to podcasts. But mostly reading.
Welcome to the lifeboat, shipmate. I’m in EXACTLY the same age range and situation as you. Sometimes I’m baffled at how un-knowledgeable and unmotivated I’ve been with finances throughout my lifetime as otherwise I’m intelligent, quick to self educate and pick-up new skills, have had a long career in technology, very motivated in other areas of my life. Growing up in a poor family with very substandard financial skills resulted in me having no education on it at home. My friends were all….um…rougher, and not interested in financial subjects. My best friend’s brother was very interested in finances and he got made fun of over it, but he’s now making more than all of us combined so he’s the one who will have the last laugh.
I’ve been travelling to South East Asia the past 3 years every summer, and during this last trip I stayed at a resort that contained many guys who were either already retired or had just moved over to retire, like fresh off the airplane starting their retirement journey. These men ranged from actual retirement age 62-70 all the way down to guys in their 40’s. It was a real kick the pants meeting guys in their 40’s and 50’s starting to retire then looking at my own situation and realizing not only did I have no plan but even if I did put a plan in place I’m very far behind the curve.
Since the week I got back from that trip last September I’ve been on absolute fire getting my shit together. My finances have had a major overhaul, everything financial in my life has changed. I’ve created an entire financial plan for 2025 and now 2026, I’m budgeting in YNAB, slashed $500 in monthly expenses which are now going to investments, maxed my 2025 Roth and almost maxed 2026 already, set automated investments from my paycheck to 30% of gross, moved neglected investment accounts from a Raymond Ripoff James advisor to self directed Fidelity accounts, picking up every overtime shift possible at my job instead of finding a second job, started a small side hustle, and many more things I can’t think of off the top of my head. I’ve always prided myself on Dedication and Perseverance and those traits are now directly aimed at retirement.
To answer your question on education; I’ve read all three Boglehead’s Guide to… books, Millionaire Mission by Brian Preston from The Money Guy show on YouTube, the entire Boglehead Wiki. I’ve spent countless hours watching and listening to The Money Guy show, Bigger Pockets Money podcast, Rob Berger, and Erin Talks Money. While I do learn some things on Reddit I’ve found much of the advice directly contradicts what I’ve learned elsewhere and I trust the book/podcast information much more than randos on the internet like me.
So, you’re not alone, lol.
Mostly the fact that the corporate grind made me sick, and there were lots of rich people in my (non-direct) environment. Like my landlord who had 80 properties and a gym business with just a highschool degree.
That motivated me to ask the question: how the fuck? — the crazy housing market (rising 10% yoy for a decade) in my hometown also drove the need for answers, as I was priced out and it felt impossible to catch up without a major change.
And that research lead to youtube, reddit, blogs. Once you’re reading for a few weeks you get down the rabbit hole pretty quickly.
Then it’s a matter of finding the correct filter: there’s lots of people peddling bs technical analysis on stocks, crypto pump & dump, speculative meme trading, pyramid schemes etc. Typically the claims aren’t supported by evidence or theory. The people making money have severe survivorship bias, or are not practicing what they preach and are just selling courses or leads (i.e. the guy selling shovels and pickaxes and telling stories of easy-access gold to mine in the mountain next to town, instead of just mining the gold himself, is probably a swindler).
There’s also places like ‘personal finance’ that are dry, boring and typically evidence-based. You can see how broad based indexes work for a hundred years. You can understand why timing the market is not wise. You can see why Buffet took a bet on passive investing. You can see why most pension funds take this slow and steady approach to building assets for their members. And a lot of the people parroting this advice have nothing to sell to you. Just like I’m not getting paid to post this, I have no incentive to lie or mislead you, we have no financial relationship, it’s just earnest advice from one human to the next.
So in short: in the first decade of corporate life I was desperate for another path, I saw successful people around me who weren’t trustfund babies or academic wizards, I searched for answers, I filtered out the get-rich-quick bs and read a lot on dry, evidence-based, get-rich-slow-n-steady advice, started early with compounding and am at a pretty decent place. (~$700k net worth mid 30s).
My parents were good with money. But I learned to invest from friends.
Took a Financial Peace University course.
YouTube (mostly) and Reddit.
Covid was an eye opening year for us. We had “made money” through our business but had been so busy we never really focused on managing investments. The breather during COVID gave us space to figure things out and basically learn a LOT of different strategies to not only invest properly and for the long term but to continue making an income after retirement consistently with our investments.
My family and most of my friends are effectively financially illiterate. I’ve managed to amass a portfolio of about 10m now and it’s still growing quite rapidly even after we retired a few years ago in our mid 40s.
If you want to understand my philosophy a book called “The income factory” basically explains it. I seek to buy and never sell assets. Assets must produce a fair bit of income to be considered for my portfolio (but I do have growth focused ETFs as well as a chunk). Currently we’re producing about 200k from dividends, about 100-150k from options trading, and about 40k or so from rentals (after our mortgages, taxes, expenses are paid).
Mostly on my own and a little from school in business classes. I’m 30. My parents mostly just instilled the value of the importance of saving so I’d have something set aside for whatever I may need and making sure I have a job that will provide stable income and benefits. They also discouraged relying heavily on credit cards. I made a ton of money mistakes in my early 20s. I was in survival mode then, yet made a few wise money choices. The biggest mistake was getting too far into cc debt, which I was very responsible at first but when I moved out on my own after being away at college and living at home for a couple years, life really started to hit with unexpected expenses and just simply not making enough at the time to have been completely living on my own but I toughed it out until I started making significantly more. I’m still learning. I’m tackling my cc debt more aggressively than ever while also working on investing more aggressively. At 24, I randomly started investing little amounts monthly but kept it really low. I’ve learned in a variety of ways from TikTok videos, YouTube videos, investment platforms, reading information online, chat gpt, my own naive mistakes and talking with others on Reddit. Towards my 28th birthday, things began to shift and I became more serious about my finances again after somewhat giving up on trying to manage it all and feeling like things would never get better…But they have gotten significantly better and I believe things will continue to improve for me. Shortly after turning 30, I started taking investing more seriously than before. I don’t really talk money with friends much so Reddit, ChatGPT and Tik tok has been a godsend to discuss questions. Honestly a lot of my friends are still figuring things out too so there’s that. Honestly you live and you learn. We are all on our own timelines. Because I could be asking myself the same question of if I’m “behind”, which I have questioned and simply let go because again there is no set timeline for when things should be done in life. It’s just not reality.
Sadly, reddit. There were no such resources when I was coming up & my influences were negative not positive. Especially familial.
Really started when I was trying to improve my credit score after some drama trying to rent; never wanted to feel that stress again.
Even if you can’t retire earlier every step you take now is going to make your retirement easier. It’s hard to not kick yourself but nothing to be done. I’ve made so many financial mistakes over the years..
My mum and also at a young age I was interested in living a good life so I started reading how to get to those goals.
Neither of my parents taught me anything about finances, so when I completed my 4-yr stint in the Navy, I had a bit of a crash course; this was 34 years ago. A couple years later I opened my first retirement account. I still remember having a bunch of prospectuses laid out across the floor of our living room as I tried to figure out what the numbers meant and which ones matter the most to me.