Have you found any resources that are helpful, high quality, free, and sane?
The r/personalfinance wiki on subreddit has some great starter content in a wiki[1] that's not a content marketing funnel into any product/service.
For investing-specific content, bogleheads also has a pretty awesome wiki [2] (though somewhat ideological, given that it's mainly around the "Bogle" philosophy).
These wikis are great because they're neutral (nothing to sell you) and also aggregated from thousands upon thousands of questions/answers/advice in each respective community.
(I work on a startup in this space and while we build a product, not content, we've basically read everything else out there).
I suppose that is where the "personal" part of personal finance comes into to play.
For example, a person will post something like, "Should I pay off my $50k student loans at 4%-6% as fast as possible, or should invest more?"
Common responses include:
1. "Would you take out a $50k loan at 4%-6% to invest?"
2. "Paying off your loans is a guaranteed 4%-6% return."
The problem I have with this advice is that in the case of response #1, that is somewhat of a false equivalence. Also, I am not sure outside of a HELOC where one could even get a $50k loan for 4%-6%. Even in this environment currently, I see banks advertising their low interest loans which clock in around 8%-12%. (I'm not counting margin loan rates in this example).
As for #2, I feel like this advice is okay at face value, but tends to fall apart once one takes more factors into account. One such factor people often miss is that one must use post-tax income to pay off student loans. Thus, in the US, assuming the person asking for advice has any income at all, then he or she must pay 10% <= x <= 37% in taxes to pay a 4%-6% loan, thus it's a guaranteed loss of 10% to 37% to get a guaranteed return of 4%-6%.
I'm not trying to downplay the powerful psychological aspect of paying off debt, but I do think more people should consider the mathematically optimal option as well (making the minimum payments on debt while maxing out tax advantaged savings before making additional payments on debt).
After all, time is the most important factor in the compounding returns/interest formula, and one can make more money but not more time. Plus, inflation slowly chips away at loans just as much as savings.
I believe that using margin loans properly requires a lot of knowledge and some strokes of luck. I've seen people get burned and some people do well with margin.
It's one of those things to me where it makes sense to use margin loans, but only if I have a high enough balance to support it. But if I have a high enough balance to survive a margin call, then I probably wouldn't need the margin in the first place, except if I were trying to invest the margin on top of what I already have, which I wouldn't be doing in most cases.
There appears to be quite a lot of overlap with /r/PersonalFinance, which would make sense considering much of the financial advice given by both sources is philosophically agnostic and somewhat ubiquitous in the world of personal finance.
But in general, I think the issue is that basic financial competence doesn't require a very sophisticated model, it just requires the emotional intelligence and self-discipline to stick to a robust one. That probably can be taught, but not a lot of schools exist for it.
- finanztip.de plus their social media presence are a great way to start
- Stiftung Warentest/Finanztest for general financial product tests
- Finanzfluss' social media presence is great, too.
- Smaller scale sources like Finanzwesir, Gerd Kommer's books plus his company's blog for well researched treatises of all things finance, backed by data.
- Education by workshop companies like Madame Moneypenny that teach hands on.
Those are my favorite sources.
http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/ifyoucan.pdf
It lays out an effective retirement strategy in the first paragraph or so, and spends the rest of the book explaining it. Short and easy read. The strategy has to be adapted somewhat for non-Americans - if you're Canadian, the adaptations can be found at https://canadiancouchpotato.com/.
Like I said, it's a start, but it also recommends a lot of good and trustworthy resources to continue your learning after you read it. I found it through /r/personalfinance as the other commenter suggested.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9C17-OMxa-7oRSaCtztObw/fea...
"Put it in index funds and do not touch it unless you need the money for an emergency", is as good of advice I have seen and will put you ahead of most people. Of course, there is more to it than that, such as the type of fund, the type of account, age, expenses, and other stuff.
>Income should always exceed expenses; work to minimize expenses and maximize income.
>You should always be saving money. A fool and their money are soon to part.
>Time = money. The purpose is to maximize both.
>Loans are assets and must be paid back plus interest.
The last step, learn double entry accounting and manage your budget tracking everything. If you don't even do that, you aren't even aware of what you blow your money on to know where to start.
(Though, notably, for a bank the client deposits are liabilities, and the loans to clients are assets, indeed.)
Mr Money Moustache [3] & Financial Samurai [4] are both good sources of Financial Independence type of content.
I used this in conjunction with:
r/personalfinance (great for thinking about spend to saving/investment ratios)
r/wallstreetbets (best for binary bets and high opportunity situations - only use with a speculative small percent )
r/realestateinvesting (all RE of course)
r/investing (general stuff)
There are a number of high quality videos on Youtube that I have found to be particularly good, depending on your own financial situation. Dave Ramsey, although maligned, is great for those with debt problems. I have no debt, and so his content has limited application for me.
I also read Investopedia [5] for general terms, Tastytrade [6] for options coverage, and many brokers provide a large amount of free content to understand investments.
[1] https://www.google.com/finance/
[3] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
[4] https://www.financialsamurai.com/
Even in the sources mentioned in this article, as well as the reddits mentioned in other comments.
Its just overly risk averse to be plainly wrong in some cases. But not wrong enough that you wont be fine, they just dont really tolerate deviance enough.
You need to know when to graduate and leave the playpen.