At 20 I lost more than $10,000 and spent the next year paying off debt. Sixteen years on, I am convinced wealth is 80% mindset, not knowledge.
Financial literacy gives a person a higher level of freedom.
Somewhere around 15 or 16 I got seriously interested in money. My father slipped me books like “Rich Dad Poor Dad” at exactly the right moment. I read, I watched videos on the subject, I talked to a mentor.
Even as a teenager I picked up on the fact that if you have enough money, you can solve an awful lot of problems. Not all of them, of course, but most.
I remember reading Robert Kiyosaki and wondering why everyone else wasn’t interested in this. Every single person deals with money, or the lack of it, every day. It is like driving a car without bothering to learn the traffic rules. The result is a constant stream of crashes, meaning financial problems.
As soon as I started earning steadily at 17, I started putting money aside just as steadily. My first attempts at investing ended badly. Greed is a poor ally when it comes to building personal capital. At 20 I lost more than $10,000 and spent the following year paying off debt.
But I kept studying finance, and 16 years later I am still learning. Along the way I became convinced that financial wellbeing is not a matter of special insider knowledge or the right connections. It is not even a matter of having capital. As my own experience showed, any amount of money is easy to lose if you are careless.
Our wealth depends 80% on our psychology and thinking, and only 20% on our current opportunities, contacts, tools, experience, and savings.
Most of the people I helped sort out their financial lives were stuck and spinning their wheels precisely because of the wrong beliefs in their heads.
For example, someone consciously sets a goal to earn a lot, while unconsciously fearing that if they get rich, everyone around them will see them as nothing but an ATM and start using them.
That creates an internal conflict, and as a result everything falls apart in their hands and they keep failing in every niche they touch. It does not matter how promising the field is. The subconscious can quietly sabotage and stop any progress.
Financial literacy is not just about logging expenses in a spreadsheet or an app. And it is definitely not about finding the right cryptocurrency and buying in early.
It is about deep work on yourself, so that you become the kind of person who can build wealth and then take care of the people close to them. It is about wise, considered decisions that pay dividends for years.
I am glad I got interested in this subject when I did. When your basic needs are covered, you can stop actively thinking about money and turn to more interesting questions and directions in your life.
The greatest benefit money brings is the freedom to stop worrying about it. Financial stress blocks out everything else extremely fast. Money is like air: you do not notice it when it is there, but you feel its absence immediately.
Do you feel financial stress in your life? Would you like to reduce it and learn to handle money differently?