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Remember luck is just the intersection of preparation and opportunity.
Saving 60% of my take-home pay was the smartest financial decision I ever made. Difficult to execute, but very rewarding long-term in the behaviors I developed.
Was saving 60% of my income the most impactful financial decision I ever made? No, I had some luck in other areas. But this level of self-discipline helped me develop the skills to handle good luck later
It wasn't huge in terms of actual numbers, but it still feels like my biggest win. I bought my first car for like $750. It needed some work, but I fixed it up. Before long, I crashed it. It was totalled. But, it was a 1973 Dodge Charger. I started pulling parts off of it and selling them on this new thing called eBay, and by the time I ran out of parts, I had made more than twice what I bought the car for.
Vasectomy BEFORE kids
That's not how it works. At least not if the vasectomy is done correctly.
Buying a 3K€ coin which turned out to be worth 5K€ + Putting a few hundred in bitcoin in 2019.
Neither of which will make me rich or even well off, and in fact both are actually completely wild guesses (=gambling). So I can't in good conscience recommend this as a strategy.
Buying a house. Got lucky and bought before the pandemic, and even then just barely scraped together a downpayment by borrowing from inlaws.
It's crazy how having a mortgage have us access to so much cheap credit. We were able to pay off all consumer debt and even most of our student loan debt. Even with all our debt bundled in the mortgage we're still paying far less than we would to rent an apartment.
It's nuts
Selling my home, car, boat and living a simple RV life without kids. Forget the financials, the lack of stress has made it so very worth it!
Bought a house in 2012. It's now worth almost 3x what I paid for it then. So wildly unfair.
Bought mine in 2017. Mine is double. It makes zero sense
Started a small mutual fund and retirement fund when I was just starting out and still in undergrad. I did not have much and was fully self sufficient. But someone came to my job and showed us how retirement plans worked and convinced me to start one. Same with a mutual fund. I never put more than $20-$40 in each because I didn’t have much but boy did that pay off.
I purchased a small condo in the city with some of the money I put away in #1. Just sold it recently (20 years after purchasing it; lived in it for 5 years, rented it out for a profit for 15 years). I made a lot of money off that sale. More money than I’ve ever seen at once.
My spouse and I have always lived below our means. Now we’re not frugal - we go out for nice dinners, travel, have kids. We also have good jobs. But, when we purchased a house we could have afforded to get one that was $600k and instead opted for a smaller townhome in a nice neighborhood for almost half the price. Living this way has paid off more than I could have ever imagined. Both of us don’t have to work. We travel whenever we want. We could technically both stop working in our 40s/50s and probably be fine. It’s a feeling of freedom. We’ve never over-extended ourselves. When our colleagues and friends were buying expensive homes and expensive cars and extending themselves, we just didn’t do that.
Getting a master's in electroacoustic music. Everyone told me I was going to stay poor forever, I decided to still do what I really wanted and it's going pretty well.
Getting out of renting and locking in a 30 year fixed interest rate of 3.25%.
My monthly housing payment is no longer going up every year.
My old apartment is already $300 a month more than I'm paying on my mortgage. It was only $200 a month less when I bought the house.
Using a budget manager (YNAB)
I’m really bad with saving money and even having enough ready for regular bills on my own. I was always on zero before the end of the month and struggled hard when there was something unexpected. Now everything is planned ahead, I have some savings and yearly expenses are just ready to pay when needed.
It needs some time to adjust to it and I had to restructure my categories a few times until it worked for me (still not perfect).
Though I don’t feel like I’m getting my money’s worth anymore from YNAB. It keeps getting more expensive, the updates are slow and it seems very US focused. If I ever find the motivation, I want to build something on my own (I’m a web developer from Europe who’s getting a bit tired of web developing)
I tried YNAB once. Wasn't thrilled about the price as well. Now I'm looking at selfhosting an instance of Actual Budget.
Not buying that over priced concert ticket for $200.. oh wait. I did that.
How was the show?
Living like a pauper for a few years and paying the mortgage off early.
Also not joining the rat race, and buying new shiny shit for the sake of it.
Getting an industry job rather than a postdoc after I finished my PhD.
Ha, couldn't handle living in poverty for 4-5 more years?
Edit: I'm glad you got out. Chasing the academic dragon is rarely worth it in my opinion.
Making a budget and sticking to it every month. I am able to save 17% of what i make and put it into Monero to avoid it getting eaten by inflation.
Buying bitcoin during COVID. Nearly tripled my investment.
It's either my best or my worst: I bought a house with my SO that we got for about half of the value