Beginning personal finance
“How do I get started investing?”
People my age don’t really understand how anything finance works. Unless they’ve taken a course on finance, they don’t really have a grasp of how to build a portfolio. And even if they’ve taken a course on finance, they might not know what to do in terms of personal finance.
I don’t claim to know everything about personal finance. But I’m at least interested enough to be able to dive in deep into topics and try to figure it all out. And I’m definitely still figuring it out.
There are a lot of different apps and services that can help, but someone just starting out is rightfully intimidated by all of the options. How does Wealthfront differ from Betterment? Chime? Acorns? What are all these services? If you blindly choose one, you could miss out on a lot of earnings by not thinking about the other options. And that scares a lot of people.
Then comes the great credit card challenge: what should my first credit card be? What’s a Chase Sapphire Reserve? What are points? How do I get first class tickets for free? To that, I say start reading NerdWallet and The Points Guy.
In the end, there’s nothing really out there that will teach you the basics, apart from standard Google searches. Friends and family are your best bets. Someone could easily address this, but the bigger problem is, everyone’s financial solutions are different. Financial planners and professionals can help, but they come at a price. So we’re back to square one.
Even if you make it past square one, there’s no chance you make it to square two: the complexity explodes. That sucks.
