The emergency fund comes first $1000 or 6 months expenses tends to be the sweet spot. It keeps you from taking on bad debt like credit cards and pay day loans. 5% of your paycheck is a good place to get started, that’s usually enough to build up funds fairly quickly without hurting too much.
Retirement doesn’t have to be a ton of money each pay check, especially if you start early in life, but if you ever want to retire you have to start as soon as possible because the later you start the more money you have to put away. Take the company match on a 401(k) or 5-20% of your paycheck. Invest in a target date fund or S&P 500, Russell 2000 fund, or whole market fund (and look at the expense ratio, you want that to be as low as possible) and call it a day. Individual stocks are for suckers, but if you want to gamble with individual stocks use 1-5% of your portfolio to do it so it’s not the end of the world if you pick a loser.
Finding your target for retirement is a big step to knowing what you need to save early. Play around with some retirement calculators and debt payoff calculators fairly often as your target number may change based on your lifestyle.
Did you get this from The Richest Man in Babylon? I just quoted another part of that book for this thread. That’s one of the core lessons of that book.
Just needed a friend to care enough to say something so simple, and it changed my life. Sobriety is terrifying for so many, but in my experience it was absolutely worth it.
Being myself, knowing myself without the dull edge of substances, actually being present in my life and in other’s lives. Drugs were an escape, a place to hide and avoid. Facing reality, while difficult, was such a more fulfilling experience than when constantly running from my own existence.
And then you get drunk again and forget them, rinse and repeat.
Physiological dependence ends within weeks, and they say after that people relapse basically because their life is bad and they miss being a checked-out junkie. OP’s response kind of reinforces that; they have a life now, and they enjoy it, so they don’t want to go back.
Obviously from everyone else’s perspective it doesn’t help. That and your reasoning are basically why I’ve stayed away from drugs and alcohol completely (and avoided caffeine), but I pride myself on being open-minded. As weird as it sounds, I need to at least consider that the guy on the piss-soaked mattress might have a point, or I’m not being intellectually honest.
When I was getting started in my design career getting jobs was hard. I had a good portfolio but not much experience. Met another designer one day and told her my dimena. Her response: Just lie. She told me everyone does to get work. So I took that advice. Next job I got paid me 2x the previous one and soon enough I wasn't lieing anymore. You think Musk got where he is today thanks to ethics and honesty? Jobs and Gates both stole either knowledge or actual products from others. I still have friends submitting resumes with large gaps, asking for help. They send it over and I embellish the hell of it, always works.
I’m fixing up my resume right now and I don’t know how to lie (I’m a student with little experience trying to land and entry job). What did you lie about?
What is the entry level job for and is there anything school related you could attribute yourself to. I went to college for industrial design so I could have made up some lab supervisory role that included my experience with the tools, helping other students, fixing machines, etc. anything that made me look like I had tons of ambition.
A specific example would be the time I applied for a web dev job. I knew front end and some backend but they needed a php person. I lied, said I had learned it at a previous job and could do whatever they needed. I counted on being able to research the solution but more than once I hired a php dev to do the simple fixes. 99% of the job was design related but I got that php issue solved at the beginning and there was no doubt from them what I could do after.
Can you do some volunteer work with your schools I.T. department. Or even some job shadowing. That's one thing I would try. Even without pay it shows ambition. Other than that, do you got a friend that needs a network setup or Linux install? It becomes "I.T. consultant for Echelon, a student-based startup. Focused on building an ethical solution for AI in education." You can peer review these entries and make sure it sounds believable, don't get greedy and don't overreach. Looks for steps maybe a little above your capability but you were heading that way anyways.
What makes a good portfolio? I feel like I’m constantly lying and it’s a pain in the ass to find clients, even though I’m confident in my technical skills.
This was the late 90s and I did a lot of experimenting with flash. It didn't take much to impress people back then. Yugop really inspired me so i did a lot of studies on interacting with the audience and it got me in the door with a prestigious ad agency and that made the rest of my career. Sometimes it's not just about client work. What is trending now? AI related projects. You could do a study for yourself about AI and marketing, Ai and web interaction or whatever. How do you think it will work? Show your creative problem solving. Get out of the conventional thinking and do something in an unexpected way. With design they love to see your progress so I always added that material. Every place you apply gets a lot of responses, it's hard to stand out but necessary.
Eh, Steve Jobs didn’t steal his product. Steve Wozniak created it, and Jobs marketed it. Jobs bought the mouse technology from Xerox, who didn’t understand the value of what they had. Jobs pushed for quality on-screen typography, and pioneered the windows based interface. I think you might be thinking of Bill Gates, who stole the Windows interface from Jobs. Apple was a truly pioneering company, which is why so many investors were interested in this company run by a few college kids out of their garage.
Survivorship bias is a thing. Just because someone is successful doesn’t mean following their advice will make you successful. “I put all my money into lottery tickets and now I’m a multi-millionaire. Everyone should do what I did!”
Depends on if you have found your passion. I found the career I was passionate about at age 14 and now have more experience than the vast majority of my peers. Until just recently, I had never managed someone younger than me, and I’ve been a supervisor for a very long time now.
They’re saying that you can and should make everything you do a fun experience. Don’t like your boring machinist job? Make a game out of measuring everything. Beat your high score for the tightest tolerance.
Don’t like pulling weeds for extra money while you’re in college? Pretend you’re a homesteader cultivating the land.
Your attitude and your perception of how things are can greatly influence how you experience things.
You’re doing neither yourself nor anyone else a favour by being overly shy and reticent. You yourself will enjoy life much more when you are yourself and while not everyone will like you, the ones who don’t often don’t stay in your life long and it’s easier to find people you vibe with if they can see you for who you are.
Granted, I very much did not take this advice as a teenager and even now I’m occasionally too shy. But looking back it was good advice and I really wish I hadn’t wasted so much time and energy on not being negatively noticed by people I didn’t really care about then and who haven’t been in my life for years.
I think I get where you are coming from here, though I question the certainty in it. There is too much nuance to humanity to never trust or always ignore.
If you never anticipate good in others, you must be very lonely - never trusting, always defensive, waiting for the next attack. We all have different levels of trust shaped by our own experiences. Personally, I try to anticipate good until a person proves otherwise. I’d rather be disappointed occasionally than miss a possible connection to someone because I never anticipated goodness.
As far as receiving advice, take it from anyone and everyone. We constantly do this, even if we don’t notice. We take in the world around us. We decided if it was good, bad, or somewhere in between. If I see someone hit their thumb with a hammer, I learn not to hold the nail in the way way did. It’s non-verbal, yet in its own way, is advice. Verbal advice works similarly. Take it in, listen to it, accept or reject it. Ether way, it is part of you. You will adapt it to your own view. If someone says that jumping of a bridge is the best thing ever, you can ignore them or you can do it. Ignoring them shapes a picture of that person as irresponsible or dangerous while shaping you to be more conscious and risk-averse. Doing it shapes that person in your mind as someone to listen to in order to do something fun. I suppose what I’m getting at is a simple question, can you really ignore advice?
I’m probably just thinking more into it than you intended.
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