I’ve wrestled with whether I come across as inspirational or arrogant.

I want to help people and show I have the credibility to back up my words. There are so many who tell you how to make money online when they aren’t making any themselves.

How do I differentiate myself from them without using the numbers as evidence? People take your words more seriously when they know you’re making money.

Yet waving around dollar amounts feels icky. I earn comfortably enough to not even think about returning to my day job but I know some people want me to reveal more.

“Six figures” seems like a nice compromise because it gives you an idea without being too specific. Though I cringe at myself for that too. Here’s why it’s as far as I’ll go.

Revenue isn’t profit

Everyone always uses the most impressive number rather than the most reflective. If you make $20k a month but you spend $50k a month then you’re poor.

It’s the dirty secret of most people who talk about how rich they are. They only show one side of the equation.

Some people do show both sides and I respect their honesty yet I’m not prepared to let the entire internet know how I spend my money. Despite being a content creator, it doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with strangers knowing the ins and outs of my bank account.

I don’t want to need to explain my every move or justify spending $8 on a giant pretzel. Until I’m willing to be precise on both halves, I think it’s better to be vague on both.

I don’t even know how much I earn

Even if I wanted to tell you how much I make a month, I wouldn’t be able to.

I’ve got a dozen income streams going into different banks accounts with different currencies. I pay myself a salary and dividends. Then there are all the various subscriptions I pay throughout the month.

On a day-to-day basis, I don’t need to know how much money I have coming in as long as I know I can pay my bills. The exact amount doesn’t make a huge difference to my life and everything is automated to reduce my mental load when it comes to tax season.

I could spend time every day to keep on top of it but it would only be so I could boast about it. A key part of the lifestyle I’m trying to build is not needing to worry about money so I can spend more time thinking about impact. I appreciate this is a privileged position but it’s my version of success.

Shining the light attracts the moths

I have posted figures in the past. My inbox blows up every time. I get so many people reaching out and wanting to be my friend. Funny isn’t it?

I’m not sure I want to talk to most of these people.

One person reached out after ten years of silence and went straight for the jugular by asking me to explain my entire business model. He didn’t bother with the courtesy of small talk.

Some strangers will aggressively try to trap my time and demand phone calls without being willing to pay. I enjoy helping people but not when they feel entitled to my time. Money seems to bring this out in people.

I want to connect with people who like my ideas, not my bank balance.

It’s not a huge part of my business

For people whose business is telling others how to make money then it makes sense to reveal how much you earn. It serves as both marketing and credibility. It’s a useful point of information for people to decide whether or not to hire you. This is why it makes sense for Zulie Rane for example.

Yet it’s not the same for me. While I do sell a writing course, it’s free for people who cancel within the first two weeks. It’s an income generator but not my primary thing.

Telling people how much I make would make me more money but it would also distract me from the things I want to do. My podcast doesn’t earn me any money at the moment but it brings so much joy to my life.

Time is my most precious resource and it’s what I’d like to help people with the most.

There are so many caveats

When I talk about money, people make the assumption I live some kind of glamourous lifestyle. I have simple tastes so can get by on fairly little (though living in London doesn’t help).

I’d rather donate to charities I care about than buy status symbols. If people think I’m poor and judge me because of it, it’s no loss for me.

There are so many things out of my control that has helped me get to where I am today. I didn’t choose my parents or where I was born. There’s been a lot of dumb luck. I might give you the best advice I can but you can’t replicate my results because of these other factors.

It’s not because I’m so special but the random good hand I was dealt by the universe.

I’m also aware what goes up can go down again. If it happens then it happens but I don’t want to tempt karma by writing in a way that breeds resentment. It is possible to chase your dreams and make a comfortable salary just don’t get hung up on the detail.

“Erm, no you’re not. Don’t be stupid.”

That was the identical reaction I got from two people I trust when I told them about my plan to buy bitcoin. One is an accountant and the other works for a hedge fund. Honestly, I’d have reacted the same way a few months earlier but I managed to convince both of them I wasn’t crazy.

Bitcoin has a massive communication problem. People who got in on this fringe product early tended to be counter-culture and stubborn. It worked out great for them but it’s rare to read anything online about Bitcoin that doesn’t feel like propaganda.

No, the government isn’t going to steal all your money if you don’t buy.
No, hyperinflation is highly unlikely to come to any major currency.
No, not everything is a lie unless it comes from a Bitcoin addict.

The truth is you can choose to completely ignore bitcoin if you want to and you’ll be perfectly fine. Some people have already made massive returns and others might in the future. Yet don’t forget, most people didn’t invest in either Apple or Pets.com in 1999 and they turned out alright.

Just because something is hyped doesn’t mean it will work out or that you need to pay attention.

I’m not a financial advisor and you should take this for educational purposes, not as investment advice. However, I’m a curious amateur who has a degree in Economics and worked as a research assistant for members of the monetary policy committee for the Bank of England.

I hope I can convince you I’m not crazy too.

Firstly, what is it?

In the simplest terms, Bitcoin is meant to be a currency like dollars or euros. Supposedly, you could use it to buy and sell goods and services. Yet while normal currencies are managed by governments, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency so ruled by fancy maths instead.

The security is built into the coins themselves through blockchain technology so they are difficult to forge or steal. Let’s be real, most people who buy bitcoin have no clue how the technology works but luckily you don’t need to. Just like you don’t need to understand the entire monetary system to trust dollars.

My confidence in Bitcoin stems from people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Both know way more about technology than I do and are vocal supporters of cryptocurrencies and the power of the blockchain. If you trust them too, you can safely use Bitcoin for transactions and assume they won’t disappear.

But it fails at being a currency

I’ll jump straight into the negative side.

Bitcoin can’t simultaneously be a great investment opportunity and a way to trade. If you think your bitcoin is going to be worth more tomorrow than today, you’d never buy anything with it because you’re sacrificing gains.

Basic example:

Day 1:
1 bitcoin = $30,000
1 car = $60,000 or 2 bitcoinDay 2:
1 bitcoin = $40,000
1 car = $60,000 or 1.5 bitcoin

If I bought bitcoin to invest, I’d be a fool to actually buy a car with it. In the above example, I’d have saved half a bitcoin ($20k) by waiting a day.

With dollars, there is stability where you know the price you pay today will be pretty much the same tomorrow. You can buy in confidence knowing and make reliable budgets because of this. Yes, prices for daily goods do change but they do so slowly and rather predictably over time. It can’t be underappreciated how stressful volatility and uncertainty can be.

A lot is made of a couple of large companies like Tesla and Twitter indicating they will look at accepting it as a form of payment. Not a lot is made of the other 99% of companies that haven’t shown any interest at all. We’re unlikely to see a sudden revolution where everyone starts paying for everything with cryptocurrency anytime soon.

Digital gold

So if it’s not a currency, what is it? Many investors treat Bitcoin as an asset in reality. They buy it like they would shares in the hope the price will increase and they can sell for a profit at a later date. These people never intend to buy anything with their bitcoin.

I’m one of those people.

This is the basic paradox of bitcoin. It needs to be useless as an actual currency to be interesting as an investment. A stable asset is boring for those who want to make money.

I view Bitcoin more like digital gold because they are both scarce as viewed as an inflation hedge. There’s a limited supply so as long as demand goes up, then the price per coin should go up. This is why many Bitcoin investors are so aggressive; they want you to buy because it increases the value of their holdings! There’s an obvious underlying bias that you shouldn’t fall prey to.

There’s a crucial difference between gold and Bitcoin though. One has desirability formed by millennia of human behavior and the other is Bitcoin. Like any currency, it only has value as long as people collectively believe it has value. Right now, a tiny proportion of earth sees this in Bitcoin whereas almost all associate gold with wealth. 84% of Americans don’t care about Bitcoin.

It could be worthless overnight

I have less than 5% of my portfolio invested in Bitcoin. I’ve worked and invested most of my income in a variety of asset classes for several years. Frankly, I can afford to lose everything I’ve invested in Bitcoin if I was particularly unlucky. I only considered Bitcoin because I have this stable (privileged) base.

Don’t buy with the money you need to put food on the table or to pay off debts. No one online is going to pay for your kid’s education if you gamble their college fund on Bitcoin and lose.

For most, it’s better to invest in a stock index because it would take an apocalypse level event to lose it all. You’d have bigger problems to deal with like fighting zombies if that happened.

Yet the possibility of bitcoin losing all its value is more realistic. The people who make these kinds of decisions have already indicated unfriendly opinions.

They wouldn’t even need to ban it for everyone, all they would need to do is say pension funds or banks were not allowed to hold it. Despite all the “fight-the-man” attitude, to reach the lofty valuations, institutional money is a necessity for prices to soar.

There are infinite other ways regulators could neuter the currency if they wanted to. The larger the market gets, the more attention it draws.

The elephant in the room

The supply of bitcoin is managed through a process called mining. This process uses excessive amounts of power to solve pointless equations. Bitcoin mining uses 0.55% of global energy consumption according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.

For context, both the Netherlands and the Philippines use less energy than is spent mining bitcoin every year. That’s a problem. A big one. Especially as the purpose of all this energy consumption is to make a few people wealthier. You might as well burn trees for cash.

Climate change is one of the major issues facing the earth’s population. Increasingly, people are going to be asked to make lifestyle sacrifices and find their taxes raised — all while bitcoin holders boast about the money they are making on every corner of social media.

To me, it looks like this makes them an easy target that most of the population don’t care about. So even if financial regulators don’t come after Bitcoin, politicians could on pro-green stance.

There is an alternative to the energy-intensive methods Bitcoin uses but it needs to make the switch sooner rather than later to avoid unwanted regulatory and activist attention.

So why am I investing?

I’m playing roulette and I’m well aware of that. I’m not deluding myself with the belief returns are certain nor planning retirement next year.

Analysts at big banks such as JP Morgan are making noise now with price estimates in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per bitcoin. BNY Mellon is looking at opening a bitcoin fund. If what some of these institutions are talking about actually happens then this kind of return is almost impossible to get elsewhere.

I’m betting enough institutional money will flow in to keep raising the price and regulators will be slow to crush it. I use the word “bet” on purpose because I don’t have any insider information, all I’m doing is guessing based on publically available information.

To pretend I’m doing anything else would be dishonest and no one in the comments has a functional crystal ball either.

The rewards for being right are huge and for me, it’s worth the risk of potentially losing my entire investment. There are troubling aspects of bitcoin but I believe there are enough smart rich fans to work out the solutions.

I’m buying into the herd mentality in the hope I don’t get too greedy and get out before an eventual crash. Nothing could go wrong with that plan, could it?

Prepare the world’s smallest violin.

When Steve Jobs died he was worth only $10.4bn and only $2.2bn was Apple stock. The man many consider the greatest entrepreneur of all time wouldn’t have even made it to the global top 50 rich list.

Remember in 2011, Apple was the darling of Silicon Valley and had become the most valuable company in the world. Microsoft seemed a million miles behind as they worked on the disaster of Windows 8. Yet Bill Gates sat on a mountain of $50bn and regularly was the richest man on Earth.

How could the contrast be so vast between the two giants? By numbers alone, you could conclude Gates was a far more successful entrepreneur than Jobs. The difference all comes down to rage-driven decisions in 1985 during the darkest time in Jobs’s career that cost him $31.6 billion.

While Jobs is rightly praised highly for his comeback at Apple in 1997, don’t make the error of believing he was perfect. He got away with emotional decisions that could have left him with a far less impressive legacy. While we should learn from his success, we must learn from his failures too. Even the very best make mistakes.

Billionaire temper tantrum

Steve Jobs was too talented at pitching for his own good:

“Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?” — Steve Jobs

These famous words convinced John Sculley to leave Pepsi and become the Apple CEO in 1983. It’s an understatement to say Steve Jobs had a strong personality and wanted things his way. Unsurprisingly, the two men clashed but Steve lost. 9 years after founding Apple, he was gone and the company drove forward without him.

While undoubtedly painful, all was not lost as Steve still had 11% of Apple’s shares. He could have retired then and without his influence seen the price of his shares increase several times over in the next 10 years. While Pixar grew much faster, this was in spite of him trying to sell multiple times but not finding a buyer.

Angry at Apple, he sold all of his shares except one to keep receiving the annual report each year. He cut himself off from the future gains of the company he worked so hard to create. It was an odd move because by keeping the single share, it showed he still cared despite the drama.

If he’d sold 1–2% of the company, he would still have enough to fund Pixar and NeXT. He didn’t need to sell but believed without him the company was doomed. It was ego and pride over reason.

He was never about the money

“When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.” — Steve Jobs

Maybe Steve Jobs wouldn’t have cared about his ranking on the billionaire table. He had more money than he ever needed and made a conscious decision not to use it as his primary motivator.

He was a visionary and his ideas changed the world forever. This fueled the fire in his belly and you hear many other top entrepreneurs make similar statements. Elon Musk is now worth over $150bn but says he has so little recreation, what’s the point?

Of course, from a PR perspective, billionaires would never say they are driven by money. It’s easier to give in to a higher purpose when you know there’s no chance you won’t be able to feed your kids or put them through college. Bear in mind, Steve Jobs was refusing to provide financial support for his daughter whilst preaching he didn’t care about his wealth.

I wasn’t born yet but I would be laughing all the way to the bank if I bought some of those shares Jobs had discarded and held onto them. This is what really resulted from the tantrum. Speculators and investors took the bulk of the rewards of Jobs’s dreams coming to reality.

Let’s say you don’t care about the money, it’s still better to use the extra wealth towards something meaningful. Contrast this with the billions Bill Gates has spent on global healthcare or the smaller but impactful donations by entrepreneurs across the world to their local communities.

You are not Steve Jobs

I repeat. You are not Steve Jobs.

Most entrepreneurs fail and don’t have more money than could meet everything they ever need. Even in 1985, he was more privileged than almost everyone reading this right now; if you currently are worth more than $100m then slide into my inbox.

It takes hard work and a healthy dose of good luck to build a successful company. 20% of entrepreneurs work 7 days a week and 57% work 6 days. Let’s say you clash with your co-founders or management, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see the rewards of the future success of the company.

You can sell the portion you need to fund whatever you do next but think coldly about the rest of your share. Consider yourself a venture capitalist, would they keep their share, or would they sell-off after an argument? It could still be the best place for your money and is likely to see greater returns than if you invested elsewhere.

This isn’t just for entrepreneurs. In any professional setting, don’t let your personal pride get the better of your reason. I’m sure you are valuable but if you burn bridges, would the other side move mountains to bring you back?

Do not try to be Steve Jobs and potentially cripple your future out of revenge.

With only 5.7% of writers earning over $100 in June, I can comfortably say I’m in the top 1% of writers. This doesn’t make me extraordinary, I’m nowhere close to the people earning $30k per month yet I am a realistic story for people to follow.

I’m going to walk you through all of my money based statistics so you have a benchmark to compare to. I don’t have a long history of blogging nor do I write about anything related to my day job, so I was a blank slate. If I can do it, you can too.

I’m a sucker for statistics and tend to overanalyze to find trends that aren’t there. There are many misconceptions about Medium and I hope my numbers and charts can clear some of them up.

Individual Stories

I went viral very early. There was one story before the $2,400 one but I deleted it, so it’s outside this analysis. Yet the overwhelming majority of my stories have earned under $25 with only four others above $100. One story has earned over half my income and three stories combined make up over 75%. I thought one viral article would give me a license to print money and I was wrong.

What you can see here is the more stories I wrote, my average earnings per story kept going down. This idea of needing to publish a huge amount of stories may get more absolute money but most stories will be duds. This is true even for the best writers on Medium. Unless your name is Nick Wignall of course.

If you’re going to write on Medium, be prepared for a lot of failures and keep getting back up. You must learn from each article to break out of the rut and know your limits. Some writers have written hundreds of articles before making any real money and I’d have given up long before.

P.S. In a crazy turn of events I have had two more articles breach $1000 in July so I’m no longer a one-hit wonder!

Monthly Income

My monthly income has been eerily consistent through coincidence. Four months were around $500 and two were just over $1000. What I want to show here is Medium earnings are not always upward trending. After doubling my money in February, I was convinced I would be in the $5k per month club by the end of my six months. You may notice a pattern as I was wrong again.

As you’ll see later the composition of my earnings changed a lot over the period. There are wild swings in income so please don’t have one $1k month and quit your day job. There will never be a case of writing ten articles a month and earn the same amount each month.

This is true even for the people at the top of the pile, they only earn what they do by creating more viral articles. When luck doesn’t go their way, their income can halve easily.

When Stories Earn Money

The great thing about evergreen content is readers can find its way after it was published. Here you see my stories written in January earned the bulk of my income until April. Only in January and April did stories written that month make the largest part of my income.

Cut out the belief stories have to go big straight away to make money. I’ve learned Medium works in mysterious ways and you can suddenly get a boost from a story months after it was published. If I were to quit Medium today, I might have a random $1,000 appear in my Stripe because an old article going viral. The more good content you have, the greater the chances one will pick up. Be patient and play the long game.

Curation

I think this graph depicts my Medium journey well. I started on a high with a curation then had a streak of six articles without being curated. This is when I was getting agitated as a lot of new writers do. But then I recovered and now my curation rate sits pretty above 70% including two ineligible articles about Medium.

My famine of curation forced my writing to improve. If you’re a new writer and can’t get curated, have a long hard look at your writing before jumping on social media to complain. Up your game as this has a large effect on a story’s success.

As we can see here, curated articles average far more than the uncurated ones: $130.70 vs $21.16. Even excluding the viral article, curated articles average over $50. The distribution gives you a chance to reach a much wider paying audience within Medium which makes the difference. Uncurated articles can go viral off-platform and bring you external views but these aren’t as valuable. I have an article with 8k external views and it brought it only $20.

Primary Curation Tag

Curation matters but does the tag itself matter? My sample size isn’t huge for each topic here but my biggest hits have both been curated in Lifestyle. My single articles with Philosophy and Education tags have also done well and writing maintains a decent average. Most other topics haven’t even beaten zero tags.

It makes sense for some topics to have larger audiences than others on Medium but this is difficult to work out with any confidence. One of the money articles has since crossed $1,000 and would move it’s average up to second comfortably.

I would suggest writing about what you are passionate about rather than trying to game the system. Each topic could have a hit and you’ll likely find the more lucrative topics are also the most competitive. If you would have never written about Lifestyle until you saw this post then your writing will reflect this.

Curation Number of Tags

When I started on social media groups, I saw people boasting about the number of curation tags their articles received. I did the same myself but it’s only vanity. I’ve got a story with 12 curation tags and it didn’t even make $5.

From the chart, it looks like two is the magic number but be cautious. My two biggest hits have two tags but I have several others with this number that didn’t do so well. You can’t read anything into how many tags except there isn’t a direct relationship where more tags equal more money.

The number of tags is completely out of your control. Any tags are better than not being curated. If I repeat this in the future, I expect all of the curated articles I’ve written to continue to bring in small amounts of income whereas the uncurated ones stagnate.

Publications

The next debate is the effect of publications. From these charts, we can see I average the highest with The Ascent, Mind Cafe, and Better Marketing. Don’t be too quick to conclude getting into these publications will make you rich overnight.

The $2,400 article was originally self-published then housed in a small publication before moving to The Ascent. This is where it made most of its money demonstrating the power of curation. Yes, publications open your article up to more readers but many stories in these big publications fail too. We can see my stories in The Startup barely moved.

I see the true power of publications in the identification of quality. The people who run publications know their stuff. If you write a story that passes their standards, the story is likely to do well anyway. Some editors will tweak your headline or make small changes they believe will help your story. Feel free to question them but trust their knowledge too. (Full disclosure: I’m a Co-editor of Entrepreneur’s Handbook).

Article Length

Finally, let’s look at how a story’s length affects its income. There’s no big secret here and you can see at no length have I had more than one hit story. The two biggest stories are seven and eight minutes long but none of the other stories of this length crossed $50.

My only two stories longer than ten minutes have both done well but they were both about Medium with deep analysis. The read time on both was under three minutes so the extra depth of the articles didn’t make a big difference to the earnings. I’ve had longer average read times on five-minute articles.

I now aim to err on being too short in my articles rather than being too long. Over six months on Medium, I’ve become accustomed to seeing a long article and scanning through it in less than a minute. If you write a story that is long make sure it justifies the reader’s time.

What You Should Take With You

I hope by seeing data laid out like this you can see the uselessness of trying to analyze every little trend. Most of the takeaways are about reducing your expectations except for curation. Curation matters.

• Expect most stories to fail. Most stories won’t make the big bucks so lower your expectations.
• Stay humble if you do well. You can have a big month and find it hard to replicate again.
• Be patient after publishing. Stories can earn most of their money way after they were published.
• Write quality in Medium’s style. Curation is the only factor which seems to strongly affect income, I would make this my priority as a new writer.
• Don’t hunt for more tags. Curation matters but no evidence more tags mean more income.
• Submit to publications. But the quality of your story and curation matters more.
• Don’t obsess over length. No length guarantees a hit.

How many times have you heard the same rigid advice about money? But they don’t know you or what your unique situation is, especially if they were your age 30 years ago as the world is entirely different.

You can’t follow outdated advice and expect the same results.

I’m going to go through 5 common rules of personal finance and explain why you should rethink them. It’s easy to blindly follow advice to your loss. I hope I can challenge your thoughts but do not make a decision based on this one story. Reflect, talk to others, and make your own decisions.

Which of these rules could you break and live a better life?

Do everything yourself

Some people know the price of everything but the value of nothing. You can save lots of money by doing everything yourself, but it doesn’t mean you should. Your time is your most important commodity.

It leads some people to do tasks they are unqualified for. My family did our garden patio ourselves many years ago. It was embarrassing to look at, and eventually, we paid a professional redo it. You think you can do your job better than an amateur could, right? Quality is worth it.

Don’t feel guilted into cooking and cleaning if you don’t enjoy it. It could be worth outsourcing if you can afford it. Life is for living, not proving you can do chores. How many people on their death bed wished they had cleaned more? The exception is building IKEA furniture. That’s pure joy.

General admin is something else worth paying for to free up time. I know many writers who hire virtual assistants and allow them to focus on what they do best. If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s something to consider seriously. Did you seek freedom from the corporate world to sort through emails?

When you’re working long hours, the extra spending can be a good trade for more rest. Who wants to work for 12 hours, with an hour commute each side, go to the gym, then come home and spend an hour cooking? This is exactly what some of my investment banking friends did. Yet they were surprised they always felt burned out and ill. Don’t risk your health to save a few dollars when you can easily afford it.

Buy a house as soon as possible

It made sense for boomers to buy houses; they were going to work in one job for 40 years. But for a market where people switch it up as much as now, it’s not so obvious.

At the age of 26, I bought my first property, and it’s been awesome. Yet what I crave from life might not match your desires. I’m happy in a stable job and don’t have a weak spot for flashy things. While I enjoy traveling, I don’t expect to be moving away from London for a long period any time soon.

Not everyone is like me, and that’s ok. Some people want to change jobs often and live in different cities. Being tied to a mortgage might not be right for them. The amount of money they would spend on a deposit can go to other things to add value to their life. I could have sustained traveling for up to 5 years with my savings. What sounds better to you?

People forget to advertise all the extra costs of buying. The greatness of getting on the housing ladder is a myth if you want to keep moving. You’ll lose thousands in commission and legal fees for starters. It’s hard to profit when hope around as you’re mainly paying off the interest of the mortgage in the early years.

In the long term, western population growth is slowing. The US population grew 33% from 1990 to 2020 but is only expected to grow by 20% until 2050. There is no certainty the seeming neverending demand for real estate will keep increasing. Unless you’re a professional, think of a house as somewhere you want to live rather than a surefire investment.

Max out your pension

People graduating now will draw their pensions in maybe 2070. How different will the world be then?

Yuval Noah Hariri thinks extremely different in his bestseller 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He explains humans have two abilities, cognitive and physical and machines can already do most of our physical work. In the coming decades, he expects they’ll be able to do more of our cognitive tasks too. When most people are economically useless, how will pensions work?

In 2070 we may need a universal basic income or have a different economic system. Most of our decisions are based on things staying the same as now, but everything is variable in this timespan. Even if the great AI revolution doesn’t happen, income tax could be way higher, wiping out the tax benefits of pensions. We have little control over how our money is invested. What if a new fund manager in 20 years makes a bad bet and loses half of our pot?

I can afford to pay into a pension scheme without making major lifestyle sacrifices. If you can’t, then it’s a question worth pondering. Alternative investments such a Roth IRA (US) or ISA (UK) may better suit your needs. You can have greater access for emergencies or when you decide to make big changes.

Pausing payments may be right for you in emergencies, if you’re struggling to pay your mortgage or debts spiraling out of control, for instance. Some extra disposable income could make all the difference, so you live a better life on the way to retirement.

Pay student debt as early as you can

I’ve read so many stories of people working crazy hours to pay off their student debts early. This isn’t a privilege thing as many people from modest backgrounds have made drastic lifestyle changes too. Some wear it as a badge of pride. Yet stop and consider if the sacrifices are worth it.

Would you rather pay back the debt slower but still have time to enjoy life too? I can’t tell you the answer to this question; you have to decide for yourself.

The interest rate on student debt might be higher than you would like. It doesn’t mean there aren’t better uses for your money. The avalanche method is paying down the debt with the highest interest rate first. Even if you don’t have other debts, can you reliably make a better return elsewhere? Let’s say you are investing in a business where you estimate high-profit margins. Using your money here could leave you in greater financial health.

In the US, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had ambitious plans for student loan forgiveness. Joe Biden then took on the platform and came up with a proposal for anyone earning under $125k per year. Let’s face it; if you earn more than that, then you can handle it. But for those under, it may be worth hanging on and checking updates. We don’t know if this will be backdated if it came into power. Imagine killing yourself doing 100 hour weeks, and it is written off anyway.

Never use credit cards

Credit cards themselves are not evil. It all depends on how you use them. You can read a book or bash people over the head one. It’s bad to use it like it’s extra money in your bank. Set up automatic payments, so you pay off in full every month, and you should be ok.

It’s your responsibility to check you aren’t spending too much regardless of whether you use a credit card. Lots of credit cards have great apps and send notifications for every use. You can easily check how much money you’ve spent. Don’t make excuses.

I have several credit cards to use in different scenarios. My main one gives me 1% cashback on everything I buy. It’s not much, but over time it adds up through compounding. Let’s say I spend $10k a year on the card then I have another $100 to invest each year for doing nothing. Other cards give travel points or discounts on bills and can allow people to afford vacations they couldn’t otherwise.

Credit card companies want people who will overspend as this how they make their money. They target young people because they think we’ll be more likely to make impulsive decisions. Prove them wrong and laugh as you lay on the beach in Costa Rica on a vacation they paid for.

What you need to take with you

The world isn’t the same as 30 years ago, and it won’t be the same after another 30. We have less certainty yet more flexibility. You don’t have to follow prescriptive financial rules if they don’t work for you, and you understand the risks.

1. Do everything yourself — Is this the best use of your time?
2. Buy a house as soon as possible — Do you have the stability in your life for a mortgage?
3. Max out your pension — Do you have immediate concerns more important than an uncertain future?
4. Pay student debt as early as you can — Can you use the extra repayment money better elsewhere?
5. Never use credit cards — Can you take advantage of all the benefits?

Remember, the answers to these questions are personal. I am not telling you what to do; you must take responsibility and talk to professionals.

Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful day!