Money is one of the skills we have to learn by ourselves.
I didn’t have a class called “Money” in high school. And if you went to a regular high school like me, you didn’t either.
Like it or not, we live in a world run by money. And still, we don’t learn a thing about money.
What we know about money is what we absorb while watching our parents sitting at the dinner table discussing or arguing about money. And they learned about money by watching their parents too.
I felt the urgency to learn about money when I started to earn a high salary as a software engineer, higher than all my previous salaries.
The fear of letting money slip out of my hands led me to watch finance videos on YouTube. One video led to another one, and videos led to books.
If you want to start your money journey, start with these four books:
1. The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason
If you want to only read one book from this list, read this one.
This book takes you to ancient Babylon and uses fables to teach you money lessons. It shows the power of stories. You will picture yourself in the middle of the desert, sitting in a caravan, listening to money lessons.
We don’t trade gold coins for food and live in cities enclosed by walls anymore. But you can easily translate the lessons in this book to our day and age.
If I could summarize this book in one sentence, it would be:
“Ask the jeweler for jewelry advice.”
Often we go to our friends and relatives with poor financial education to ask about money. That’s an expensive mistake!
Key Lesson: Pay yourself first and save 10% of your income.
2. Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
This won’t be a complete list of money books if I don’t include this one.
It doesn’t matter if Robert Kiyosaki’s rich dad is real or not.
Again, the power of stories to share lessons. It tells what his best friend’s dad, the rich dad, taught the author and his best friend about money.
The rich dad taught them not to work for money but for experience and lessons. And the poor dad taught them to go to school, get good grades, and get a job.
“JOB is an acronym for ‘Just Over Broke’”
The lesson I remember the most from this book is the employee/employer dilemma. Employees do the minimum not to get fired and employers pay their employees the minimum so they don’t leave. They’re always in a conflict of interest.
Key Lesson: An asset puts money into your pockets and a liability takes money out of your pockets. To be truly rich, buy assets, not liabilities that look like assets.
Repeat out loud: if it doesn’t put money into my pockets, my car is not an asset.
3. Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins
This book is a collection of letters and posts the author wrote to his daughter to teach her about money and the Stock Market.
The premise of this book is that some young people don’t care much about money, so they need a simple plan to build and preserve wealth.
This is the book that taught me about emergency funds. Well, the book called it “F*ck-you money.” Some savings to keep the boat floating when you don’t tolerate your job anymore and just want to tell your boss the big F-word or when the decision to leave is not yours.
Thanks to an emergency fund, I kept my family’s boat floating for months after an unexpected layoff until I found something else.
“[Before picking stocks], ask yourself this simple question: ‘Am I Warren Buffet?’ If the answer is ‘no,’ keep your feet firmly on the ground with indexing.”
The author is a fan of low-cost index funds and that’s the approach he teaches in the book. Stick with a total market index fund and invest regularly the same amount no matter what disaster or recession “experts” are forecasting.
Key Lesson: Stay away from debt, keep your expenses in check, and invest in broad index funds like the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF (VTI) and
Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO).
Against the author’s teachings, I have to confess I added a second fund on dividends to my portfolio. Sorry!
4. Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
This one is less about the mechanics of saving and investing. It covers 20 lessons about money, all of them around the premise that money is a soft skill.
Money isn’t about rational decisions we make in front of an Excel file. It’s more about the emotional decisions we make at the dinner table.
The story I remember the most from this book is the one about the janitor who went unnoticed until he died, and his net worth was revealed. He was a multi-millionaire who donated part of his fortune to the local school and library. In his lifetime, he kept saving and investing his modest salary.
Key Lesson: Money is not what you can see: fancy watches and expensive cars. Money is the assets that haven’t been made into fancy watches and expensive cars yet.
Parting Thought
You could read more books and watch more YouTube videos. Some are more practical, others more philosophical.
But all of them have in common that money is a mindset and a skill we can master like any other skill.
Money isn’t evil. Money is what we decide to be. It’s a multiplier of our values. Remember: “If it’s in our heads first, it won’t be in our hands.”
It’s discouraging when a teacher corrects your mistakes in every phrase. It makes you want to stop speaking.
I’ve had all types of teachers:
The ones who cut you off in the middle of every sentence to correct you
The ones who write corrections on a whiteboard
The ones who don’t correct at all
We need the right balance when learning a new language.
If we’re not corrected, we keep making the same mistakes. But if we get corrected all the time, we lose confidence.
After taking many language courses and doing plenty of language exchanges, here’s my strategy for correcting mistakes:
Instead of cutting off your language partner (or student) in the middle of a sentence to point out a mistake, restate the sentence or ask a follow-up question without the mistake.
For example, if someone says “my brother don’t like apples,” you could say:
You mean your brother doesn’t like apples?
Why is that? Why doesn’t your brother like apples?
You’re correcting the mistake while keeping the conversation going and without discouraging the other person with too many corrections.
That’s not discouraging. It’s relieving, at least for me.
It lowers our expectations when starting any creative project, like writing or painting, for the first time.
Our first posts, paintings, or pictures will be in that 90%
My first post was in the 90% of crap.
I wrote my first blog post back in 2018. And “post” is a strong word. It was a word vomit. I dumped a bunch of words into a document and published it online. I still keep that post unedited to remind me how I started.
My first LinkedIn post was in the 90% of crap too.
I made all LinkedIn sins possible in a single post:
Only an external link.
Hashtags and emojis.
No whitespace for readability.
Zero formatting for mobile devices.
The way out of that 90%?
Keep showing up and keep improving.
Think of every repetition, post or painting, like a small experiment. Small experiments give you room to explore, to break the rules, to see what happens. If an experiment failed, you’ll always have a new experiment the next day.
How do I know I’m improving?
If you find your first repetitions cringe-worthy, you’re improving.
If, after months of repetitions, you don’t cringe when going back to your first posts or paintings, you haven’t improved much. You need to do more experiments.
90% of everything is crap. That’s encouraging. We only need a bit of effort to get ahead of that 90%.
If I had to define my 2024 in one word, it would be: Change.
In 2023, I got burned out and sick. And when I was laid off in early 2024, I felt both worried and relieved. I needed some time off.
That layoff taught me valuable lessons about life, career, and money.
My coding side
2024 felt like a rollercoaster.
After getting laid off and sending dozens of applications, I decided to take some time off to take care of my health. A mini-retirement.
After the radio silence and a few “thanks, maybe later” replies, I started freelancing with a small software agency. That helped me stay afloat for a month or two without running out of savings.
In 2024, I doubled down on my online presence.
I created two video courses on Udemy: here and here. I hired Microsoft’s Copilot as my assistant to create the promotional materials. All the content and recordings were made by me. A human.
My career reflections
Being laid off gave me time to reflect on my career after over 10 years of non-stop work.
Last year the coding world went nuts when Devin, “the first AI software engineer,” was released and I gave my predictions for coding in 2034.
If you’re reading this from the future, let me know if I nailed it with my predictions. By the way, do you have flying cars or are you still dreaming about them?
I created a 7-day email course to share the lessons I wish I had known to survive a career in software engineering. I share what I’d tell my younger self starting his first professional coding job.
I will remember 2024 as the year I went all in on my writing.
After writing for more than 5 years, I took my first writing class. That gave me momentum to keep the writing ball rolling. I even created a tag /misc to write about everything outside programming and software engineering.
Starting on November 1st, I began writing daily on my blog. Those daily posts fueled my writing everywhere else.
LinkedIn
After months of inactivity in 2023, I revived my LinkedIn account from Zombieland.
I challenged myself to write 100 short-form native posts. I started with 1 post a week, then 2, then 3… I doubled my follower count and had two or three “viral” posts. Those are vanity metrics. But the main benefit? The fear of writing in social media is gone!
It turns out LinkedIn is not that cringy when we follow the right strategy.
dev.to
In 2024, I kept reposting some of my posts on dev.to.
The dev.to team featured three of my posts in the Top7 posts of the week. These ones:
