Let me discuss some ideas that I consider to be rather bad, but which are expressed frequently online, or they exist as a custom, at least regionally.

The first such idea is “stacking silver”, basically converting part of your monthly income into silver and adding it to your stash, as a form of inflation-proof savings. This makes sense in countries where there is no additional tax on the purchase of silver bullion. In the EU, there is up to 25% of VAT on silver, which makes it an enormously bad idea as a form of saving money, since you lose up to 25% of your income on every transaction, and that doesn’t even account for the losses you will incur on sale. Silver is for Americans, and since the majority of silver-stacking youtubers are Americans, that might seem as a good and commonly practised idea; in Europe, it is not. There is a catch, though. There is no VAT on pre-owned silver, so that might be a good idea to buy, but generally speaking, you need to see what makes the most sense in your country and region.

Things that make sense in America are suicidally dumb somewhere else. For instance, investing in the stock market in Croatia is almost guaranteed to give you a loss; I looked at the investment funds managed by the banks here several times and they all reported negligible or negative income. Investing in stocks in the USA is a sound financial advice, at least until the stock market crash wipes you out. Don’t just listen to advice online and think it’s universally applicable. Also, you can’t just put money somewhere and expect it to do well. You need to actively manage it, for instance if you hold investment papers, you need to always have an eye not only on the stock market, but on the overall state of the economy as well, and you can’t just have someone manage it for you, because you need to know when to get out, and I’m sure the investment fund managers aren’t going to tell you that.

There’s a regional custom of giving your children gold coins, usually for religious or educational milestones. I buy mine new computers, because guess what, gold in the amounts I could give them is useless, and computers, in today’s world, are how you learn to create income. You first need to learn how to make money, and for that you need to invest in yourself, in new tools and in acquiring marketable skills. The same goes for your children. You can’t just send them to school and hope they will magically learn something marketable there, because guess what, almost nobody does. For learning how to take care of yourself, in the sense of creating an income stream, school is worse than useless.

My kids tell me they are all communists there and tell them incredibly stupid ideas such as “you need to do the things you love as a job”. How about no. You need to learn how to do many things, have diverse skills, and then figure out which one of the things you can do, or can quickly train yourself to do, will make you the most money, and then make that your job. Avoid things people would like to do, or which they do as a hobby. That’s the financial red waters, places with many sharks or crocodiles in not much water.

Another horrible idea is saving money; not universally, but if you start too soon. If you’re a teenager or living on small income, don’t buy silver or gold coins with your pocket money and think you’ll have a huge stack of money when you’re older. No, you’ll be poor and stupid. Invest in your skills, buy the tools you need to do jobs, instead of buying silver every month rent an online server and learn how to write code, and then sell services online, or something like that, something that will get your income started, something that aims at the broad global market. Don’t listen to people who tell you to mow lawns or wash cars for money. That’s what they did, and it might have made sense 30 or 50 years ago, but it no longer does. You need to establish a global presence, learn to swim in the great ocean immediately, because all the smaller waters are red with blood and sharks. Everybody there is competing with the global market anyway, so the money you can make is terrible, basically your prices are globalized and your marketplace is local. The worst combination you can have. You have nothing to lose from going global immediately. So, for the greatest part of your career you need to avoid saving money; you need to invest it in yourself and your business, because you don’t have a good income yet, and saving a percentage of almost nothing is, well, less than almost nothing every month. Keep your money in your business, in your tools, and in growing your abilities and business contacts. Of course, that will only get you so far, so there’s no sense in overpaying for tools because that won’t get you anywhere, but if you really need that new iMac because you’re writing iOS code, then you need that new iMac. That’s the core tool of your business. But if you’re writing PHP code in Linux, just get a good monitor, mouse and keyboard, and you’ll save lots of money on hardware by not buying a Mac. It all depends on what you do. As a rule, it makes sense to buy the cheapest tools that will get the work done, but not cheaper than that. Depending on your business, you’ll know that point where overpaying for tools no longer makes any difference in your performance, and just decreases your profitability. So, at that point it might make sense to invest that money in hiring people, instead of just throwing it into equipment. That way you can gradually get your business to the point where it’s working even if you’re not. Which brings us to the most important point.

Avoid types of jobs where each additional unit of money means you need to do an additional unit of work. That’s what my father did for a living, and that’s how I learned it’s not good. He was/is a sci/tech translator, and for each 10 EUR of income he had to translate a page of text. That’s a very reliable way of being poor and at a huge long-term financial risk, because when you’re sick or when you need to retire, you’re basically fucked. You need to create passive income, things that produce money even when you’re not there working. You don’t want to be unloading watermelons from trucks and being paid per watermelon or per hour. You want to be in a position where you own a company with ten workers, five of which write/maintain code, five of which sell, give user support and do paperwork, and you want to be in a position of finding other areas to branch into, thinking of ideas about future products, and while you’re doing it, code gets written and products get sold, and nothing had ground to a halt just because you had a flu.

Also, if your parents aren’t wealthy self-made businessmen, you need to understand that everything they taught you was probably wrong, and school didn’t help a bit. I was in such a position regarding finances and earning money; everything I knew about it was wrong, and produced costly mistakes, but I had to stumble along and learn things the hard way, until I got to the point where I’m teaching my kids the things you can learn from wealthy people online, but which I didn’t listen to because everything I knew was wrong and I didn’t know it was wrong. That’s the most dangerous position to find oneself in, because when you think you know how things work, and you’re wrong, you don’t feel like shutting up and learning. Also, while I was learning it the hard way there wasn’t really anything useful on the Internet.

Now comes the strange part: break those rules whenever necessary. Do completely non-profitable things just to help others whenever you feel like it. Save money if you don’t have an obvious investment path ahead of you, and then you’ll have the means to exploit an opening when it does occur. Do incremental work until it’s possible to generate a passive income stream, and even when you have a passive income stream, just to complement it, because income streams fail. Listen to the experienced people, but have in mind that things change and the world today has opportunities and openings much different from those before, and don’t be afraid to plunge into something new and untested, especially if you’re young enough and you can afford the experiments. Do things locally if there’s a good business opportunity, and especially if you can extend it online and create a broader market later. Basically, when listening to advice, including mine, use your brain first, and see what’s actually applicable and useful for your specific situation.