There's three pieces of financial advice I got that I think are really good.
1. Much debt has higher interest than almost any investment you can make. Credit Cards can be 30% or even higher. Therefore, before you invest a penny, you gotta pay down your high interest debt and keep it down. Even if you find an investment that pays the same as the interest on your credit cards, the gain from not paying interest on credit card debt is 100% guaranteed (notwithstanding racking them back up, but that can be compared to selling the stock before it's done growing), and the gain from any 30% stock is absolutely not guaranteed and there's also a chance of your investment going to 0, such as investments in Enron or FTX. No-risk 'returns' are always better than the equivalent high-risk returns.
2. Right now you can put your money in a money market fund and get more than 5% and a low risk. So what you do is to invest your "emergency fund" in something low risk but positive yield, and then get a line of credit, so if you need that money in a pinch, you use the line of credit then pull the investment out to cover the cost. That way, your emergency fund isn't sitting there soaking up inflation, and you have quick access to money if you need it.
3. If you have a spouse who doesn't work or makes much less than you and you live in Canada, then you can put money into a "spousal RRSP". This lets you take the tax benefit yourself, and the money goes into her RRSP. After a few years, that money fully vests and so if she takes it back out the tax hit becomes hers, not yours, and so if she makes less then you can take advantage of the arbitrage between the two. If you're buying a house for the first time, you can put about 35k into a spousal RRSP and take that tax benefit, then immediately use that money to buy your first home, and then over 15 years you can either put the money back into the RRSP, or you can just do nothing and it'll be added to your spouses income tax, and if she is low enough, it's basically making all that money tax-free.
1. Much debt has higher interest than almost any investment you can make. Credit Cards can be 30% or even higher. Therefore, before you invest a penny, you gotta pay down your high interest debt and keep it down. Even if you find an investment that pays the same as the interest on your credit cards, the gain from not paying interest on credit card debt is 100% guaranteed (notwithstanding racking them back up, but that can be compared to selling the stock before it's done growing), and the gain from any 30% stock is absolutely not guaranteed and there's also a chance of your investment going to 0, such as investments in Enron or FTX. No-risk 'returns' are always better than the equivalent high-risk returns.
2. Right now you can put your money in a money market fund and get more than 5% and a low risk. So what you do is to invest your "emergency fund" in something low risk but positive yield, and then get a line of credit, so if you need that money in a pinch, you use the line of credit then pull the investment out to cover the cost. That way, your emergency fund isn't sitting there soaking up inflation, and you have quick access to money if you need it.
3. If you have a spouse who doesn't work or makes much less than you and you live in Canada, then you can put money into a "spousal RRSP". This lets you take the tax benefit yourself, and the money goes into her RRSP. After a few years, that money fully vests and so if she takes it back out the tax hit becomes hers, not yours, and so if she makes less then you can take advantage of the arbitrage between the two. If you're buying a house for the first time, you can put about 35k into a spousal RRSP and take that tax benefit, then immediately use that money to buy your first home, and then over 15 years you can either put the money back into the RRSP, or you can just do nothing and it'll be added to your spouses income tax, and if she is low enough, it's basically making all that money tax-free.
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