🔴 Improving Your Finances In 2024
For me, 2024 is the year of focus and growth.
I want to focus on growth in a few categories.
Experiences, opportunity, and wealth.
Experience brings opportunity, and opportunity brings wealth if you know how to act on it.
Today’s newsletter will be about my wealth journey and the tools I’ll use to grow wealth in 2024.
You Have To Start Somewhere
“The rich have money, but the wealthy don’t worry about money,” Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
I want to be in a position where I don’t have to worry about money. It will probably take decades, but luckily, I enjoy the process of budgeting and investing.
I’ve been interested in investing since 2017. It started once I learned that inflation erodes your buying power over time. Around that time, I invested as much as I could afford to lose into Bitcoin. Bitcoin increased in price, and I put the profit into some NFTs. The NFTs then increased in price, and I sold a handful of them. I then took the money from NFTs and put it into a down payment for a house at a low-interest rate right around COVID times.
I then quit my job and had zero cash flow. I was able to live off the rest of the NFTs, selling them off as my expenses came due. At that time, NFT prices started to fall, and I quickly drained most of my NFT investments. Had I cashed out all my crypto investments, they would have been worth $1,000,000.
I don’t regret missing out on $1,000,000, as I’m convinced I wouldn’t have landed my dream job at VeeFriends and move to New York City, where I currently live.
The house is nearly cash-flowing. If anyone in the Metro Detroit area of Michigan needs a room to rent, the last room is available!
In summary, I’ve made a few decent financial moves and would like to make real progress in my long term wealth plays. I recognize that the wealth growth I experienced through crypto isn’t repeatable this time around, and I’m completely ok with that.
Where To Start
The book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki changed my perspective on money and debt.
The difference in how the rich and the poor choose to spend their money was the biggest lesson I got from the book.
If you live paycheck to paycheck (61% of Americans do, according to CNBC) and want to get serious about growing your money, reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad is THE place to start.
If you know someone who’d like to become financially literate this year, send this to them! If three friends subscribe using the link below, you’ll earn a free month of the paid version of this newsletter.
Where To Budget
If you don’t know where your money goes, you won’t know where to make it grow.
I used to use an app called Mint Finance, but it merged into CreditKarma, and that app sucks for budgeting.
I recently switched to NerdWallet, and I’m super impressed so far. I like to see which categories I spend the most money in at a quick glance.
It has your cash flow, credit score, and net worth all on one screen.
I highly recommend using NerdWallet.
First, link your bank with NerdWallet.
Then, manually categorize all line items from the last six months so you know the data you’re looking at is accurate.
Where To Grow
After reading a few chapters of Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order by hedge fund legend Ray Dalio and having read most of Big Debt Crisis by the same author, I’m fascinated by the macroeconomic landscape right now.
The book Changing World Order shows that the economy has always been cyclical.
The studies in the book go as far back as the 1400s.
As shown in the chart above, the United States currently has the strongest economy of any country in all of history. You’ll also note that the top economies don’t stay on top forever. That’s not to alarm you and say their citizens will live terrible lives afterward. It means that citizens' opportunities after it falls from #1 are less juicy.
I’m nearly starting the chapter that talks about investment strategies that historically work when the strongest economy falls from the top spot, so I don’t have any major takeaways on WHERE to put the money, nor do I have an interest in telling people exactly what to invest in.
With that said, this book is a deep deep deep dive into how the world economy works. If you plan on living in America over the next 30 years and want to have your money right, this book is a must-read.
All the charts from the book can be accessed in this PDF for free, and so is the full audiobook on Spotify if you’re a Spotify Premium subscriber.
That’s it for this week!
If you get any of the books or apps mentioned today (or already have them), please let me know what you think!
If you enjoyed this and want to see a massive list of rabbit holes spanning books, AI, tech, creator tips, inventions, energy, optimism, career growth, history, and just about anything else I find interesting… Click below to become a paid subscriber and get the list at the beginning of every month.
