- Not having a car (always living/renting in walking or biking distance of my work)
- Moving in with my partner straight out of college so we could split expenses
- Moving (with partner) to a low-cost-of-living city for the first 5 years after college
- Putting most of my medium-term and long-term savings into low-expense-ratio, passively managed index funds starting in my early 20s
- Buying almost exclusively second-hand clothes, furniture, and cookery
- Borrowing all desired books (and many desired movies and TV shows) from the library
- Only buying games when they are bundled or otherwise on steep discount years after release
- Pirating any other media in which I'm interested if its distributors make it even remotely difficult for me to buy it at a reasonable price
- Planning all dinners in advance every week before grocery shopping (leads to almost never eating at restaurants or ordering takeout, and almost no food waste because grocery list is based on actual meals)
Now, if I had to choose the best financial move out of that list? Probably the index funds. Though not having to pay for a car (or car insurance, or car registration, or car repair and maintenance, or parking, or fuel) is a close second.
In 2017 my landlord raised my rent from $1k to $1100 a month for the place I rented with my daughter because I finally broke down and got her a dog. I was annoyed because this wasn't in the lease but I was month to month by this time and figured I could probably get a house around me for the same cost and at least I'd be building equity. I closed in 2018 on a $120k fixer upper on 12 acres. I got a $30k rehab loan and my mortgage/insurance/property tax payment ended up being just over $1100. I spent 7 months in major renovations.
Fast forward to today, I have a 2.875% mortgage rate with just over $1000 a month all in payment (early COVID refi saved me about $100/month), my house was just appraised for $415k, and I was able to sell 5 acres of the land for a total of about $160k.
A free shelter dog ended up turning $150k into $575k. 10/10 would recommend.
As 2023 was beginning I set a goal that I would have $5k in the bank no matter what.
Up to this year I’ve been living paycheck to paycheck. But resolving to save up $5k pushed me out of that for the first time ever.
I never did hit $5k. But I stopped living paycheck to paycheck. I haven’t checked my balance before paying rent since february of last year. I always have enough, and I just pay the bill.
Working with my SO to start budgeting each month. We now have a system in place that works for us and a habit of getting out in front of expenses.
Budgeting helped us see that increasing your income is far more powerful than reducing spending, so we’re focused on spending to gain skills and increase our top line right now.
Not buying a boat
I'm in the States so dunno how this translates... But my parents made get a 500usd limit credit card when I was like 14. It had been the best decision that I've made. My credit is so dn good now that I can get what ever I want easily approved. That and they insisted I make a home purchase at like 23- right be fore the mortgages went nuts. My mortgage is like a quarter of what others pay for a rental...
Thanks ma and pa 🤜🤛
It was accidental.
So I started working at a startup right after I graduated college. They couldn't pay a competitive wage, so they gave me a ton of stock. A year into working there, about half the company was laid off. I survived. They begged us not to leave the company by giving us more stock. I started interviewing elsewhere, because I have bills to pay, but I never got any other jobs. Then one day they handed me an envelope. It contained paperwork for even more stock. I thought it wasn't going to be worth the paper it was printed on, so I kept looking for other jobs. Never found one.
Well, a few years go by and the company starts doing very well. Then we got bought out. Suddenly all the worthless stock they gave me was worth a fuck ton of money. The buying company bought ALL of it. Even unvested shares. One day they wrote me a really, really big check, then I went and bought a house.
It was absolutely life changing, and I tried to throw it away at every chance I got. I got so lucky.
Accidentally buying a modest house in what at the time was a "distressed" neighborhood because it was all we could afford. 15 years later the neighborhood has been gentrified and is highly desirable. The property has tripled in value and the land is now worth more than the house itself.
Anyhow, it was dumb luck on my part and again, mostly had to do with the place being affordable and relatively close to my wife's parents.
I decided to basically stop buying anything unless I absolutely needed it for about two years. I put everything I had towards paying off my car and student loans. I had holey socks and shirts, torn up shoes, etc. Refused to spend money.
As a result, I was able to invest the money I was paying on my car and loans and eventually worked enough for a down payment on my current house.
Buying a house during covid when I saw rent was increasing drastically for no apparent reason. I could barely afford it at the time but thanks to inflation and a couple raises, I'm comfortably sitting on a house that's now worth 50% more than I bought it for, and paying way less than current rental prices. Rent is insane right now.
Starting investing into index fund ETFs
I only started about 3 years ago but even if I stopped putting in more money right now it would still keep paying me interests around 2000 to 3000€ each year for the rest of my life and it's 100% passive income. In my case it's all invested back into the funds though.
The second best move was starting to track my finances. It's almost impossible to not change your spending habits once you actually see where all the money is going. Almost anyone can cut atleast 100€ a month from their grocery bills by just being a little more mindfull about what you buy. That's 1200€/year or 12k€/10 years.
Buying $109 worth of Bitcoin back in 2014. I was going to buy a year cloud mining contract, but the company (hashop) went out of business before I could. (I dodged a bullet there) I then proceeded to spend bits of it here and there (coincidentally, my second worst financial move) until I had about $70 worth left, which I put in a paper wallet and forgot about. In 2020, I was able to sell most of the Bitcoin, and bought a vehicle, which helped me get through college and made me more eligible when I met the girl who would become my wife. All this to say, I made some dumb decisions that just happened to turn out well for me. YMMV
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For the first few years of my career after college which has a pretty generous 401k company matching scheme I put the maximum amount possible into my retirement accounts and lived well within my means to build up a nest egg. Now that I am married I have dialed back my investments so we can afford to live a little bit nicer with the knowledge that we have a really great start in our retirement accounts.
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My wife and I moved in together two years before getting married. This made living substantially cheaper for both of us and made us positive that we wanted to live together and could tolerate each other prior to tying the knot :).
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I got a vasectomy mid-last year. My wife and I both agreed long before marriage that we only want to adopt. Adoption is obviously very expensive, but now we have the peace of mind of knowing we have full control over when we start to invest in that process to expand our family. No "accidents" can happen which is very liberating.
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Vasectomy like 10 years ago. Kids are expensive.
Remember luck is just the intersection of preparation and opportunity.
Saving 60% of my take-home pay was the smartest financial decision I ever made. Difficult to execute, but very rewarding long-term in the behaviors I developed.
Was saving 60% of my income the most impactful financial decision I ever made? No, I had some luck in other areas. But this level of self-discipline helped me develop the skills to handle good luck later
Buying a 3K€ coin which turned out to be worth 5K€ + Putting a few hundred in bitcoin in 2019.
Neither of which will make me rich or even well off, and in fact both are actually completely wild guesses (=gambling). So I can't in good conscience recommend this as a strategy.
I bought gas before it went up $0.30/gal
Using a budget manager (YNAB)
I’m really bad with saving money and even having enough ready for regular bills on my own. I was always on zero before the end of the month and struggled hard when there was something unexpected. Now everything is planned ahead, I have some savings and yearly expenses are just ready to pay when needed.
It needs some time to adjust to it and I had to restructure my categories a few times until it worked for me (still not perfect).
Though I don’t feel like I’m getting my money’s worth anymore from YNAB. It keeps getting more expensive, the updates are slow and it seems very US focused. If I ever find the motivation, I want to build something on my own (I’m a web developer from Europe who’s getting a bit tired of web developing)
- No kids
2 Studying
- No kids
Getting a master's in electroacoustic music. Everyone told me I was going to stay poor forever, I decided to still do what I really wanted and it's going pretty well.
It wasn't huge in terms of actual numbers, but it still feels like my biggest win. I bought my first car for like $750. It needed some work, but I fixed it up. Before long, I crashed it. It was totalled. But, it was a 1973 Dodge Charger. I started pulling parts off of it and selling them on this new thing called eBay, and by the time I ran out of parts, I had made more than twice what I bought the car for.
Making a budget and sticking to it every month. I am able to save 17% of what i make and put it into Monero to avoid it getting eaten by inflation.
It's either my best or my worst: I bought a house with my SO that we got for about half of the value
Studying hard on my first year university. My GPA started high so I had a bunch of scholarships and grants. It's easy to maintain a high GPA than to bring a low GPA to a high level. I religiously apply to scholarships and grants also. I paid maybe 1/4 of my tuition fees.
Things to note:
- My 4 year bachelor degree in healthcare only cost $25,000-30,000 including books.
- The gov't even gives 60% back of tuition paid as tax refund every year until the gov't party changed a few years after I finished.
- Also gov't gives out cheap educational loans especially for low income families back then.
- Not in US.
Buying bitcoin during COVID. Nearly tripled my investment.
getting accidentally hired and finally making enough.
story: every job I've ever applied for in tech didn't work out. I was a dishwasher until right before covid when someone recommended me for a cybersecurity position. Before that I had obsessed about FIRE or living in a car or being careful about too much starbucks or avocado toast... without making enough for a car or health insurance. That job paid ~half of what cybersecurity should pay, but was AMAZING. My next job paid just a hair under average, three years later. night and day, able to afford to exist without help.
financial advice be damned. I couldn't "find" anywhere with lower rent. I was in the lowest cost of living possible regionally. What needed to change was the PRIMARY job's income rate, not adding some side hustle. Either make rent cheaper or find a higher wage.
I'm not making enough to consider your next fancy moves like getting a house.
Having kids made me go back to college and get a better job (pell grant covered cost back then as we were poor as fuck). So that was probably #1. Without kids I would not have bothered so even though they are expensive it's been a net benefit bigger than any other single factor.
Leaving my deadbeat ex is a close second, though. Getting into a more functional relationship with someone who can and does hold down a job.
Changing jobs instead of showing loyalty to employers who couldn’t give two shits when it was time to let me go.
Bitcoin.
Budgeting (with YNAB 4).
Getting my spending and saving planned made money a lot more useful. It might seem paradoxical, but having a system of limits ultimately gave me more financial freedom.
Also, changing jobs. Don't be afraid to jump if you've got marketable skills.
Med school
I don't think I could pick just one thing as success is usually a combination of things (including dumb luck).
However, if I had to, I would pick staying positive and never giving up on success.
Going all in on the stock option program, even if it was a little risky. I remember the argument: There's no lottery or casino that'll give me odds like these. I also left when we'd grown to the point where middle management didn't want to understand that when the program ran out (4 years) and had to be restarted at the new validation, that was basically a static pay cut for me. I get paid a lot more now, but I still made more from stocks than work last year.
Second, our apartment. It's a lot like a row house, except it's in the city. The other part backs right up to the park.
Third, maxing out parental leave with both of our kids at a company that (as, more or less, a recruiting gimmick) topped up parental leave pay from the capped 80% to, iirc, 100% with no cap. They turned out be quite dumb about this and had shuffled me into a corner when I came back. I was ready to put my back into it, but well, I guess not then.
In life it's been mostly pure luck, but one of the few things I really recommend is to keep in the loop about rebates, programs and services offered by my federal and provincial government. Stuff like rebates on first time home buying, electric bikes, and energy efficient equipment is nice cause I bet I saved at least 3000$ total.
In recent time tho the biggest one has been getting a bicycle. I got an e-bike but even a regular bike helped me stop paying through the nose for gas when I was just burning it mostly sitting in traffic.
Buying a house. Got lucky and bought before the pandemic, and even then just barely scraped together a downpayment by borrowing from inlaws.
It's crazy how having a mortgage have us access to so much cheap credit. We were able to pay off all consumer debt and even most of our student loan debt. Even with all our debt bundled in the mortgage we're still paying far less than we would to rent an apartment.
It's nuts
I guess buying my apartment at the time I bought it. Got great mortgage rate and a good price. Fast forward 2 years, the rates are 6 times higher and prices are least 50% up. Turns out I hit a historic low.
Switching to an IT degree at the last minute, would have been a history teacher otherwise.
Buying a home.
Investing at 21 my entire college fund. I wasn't going to use it anyway.
When my parents retire I will finally be able to buy a house so being born to parents that owned a home and waiting.
Most of the things mentioned in this thread is most dumb luck and not actual active financial decisions.
Idk if I really made the moves so much as they fell into my lap but I really made out well off of covid.
In 2020 I had 2 goals, start seriously saving for a house, and have a wedding.
I moved into a much smaller apartment that was closer to work in Jan of 2020, we planned to spend the year mostly outside the house anyway.
But with the excess savings from not doing anything, combined with the weddding money, combined with the absolute floor for mortgage rates and a panic dip in the market, and a seller who was in a big hurry to get out of the house that was clearly too small for their large family we could just barely afford a house. Cost us 800k.
For the next 3 years we put all our money into paying down the mortgage. Then this year we sold for 1.2mil and bought a bugger much more suited to our need house for 600k, far away from both our works.
Now when our mortgage renews* in 2 years and we go to a much higher interest rate we will probably keep the same monthly payment, we have big cash for reno, paid off our ev and had the pocket change for a reception.
* in canada the longest you can lock in a rate is 5yrs
Dave Ramsey financial planning/yellow envelope method.
Invested in Tesla
I sunk about 70k into $TSLA in 2020. Sold the brokerage shares to pay off my mortgage and buy a Model X for my family. The stock also grew my kids’ UTMA accounts to pay for about half of college, or perhaps large down payment on their future home.
There were a lot Tesla of haters back in 2020. There are probably more now. But whatever your opinion may be, that company has changed the world for the better. Accelerated the transition to electric transport: just like they said they’d do. I’m excited for the second generation to succeed: Rivian, BYD, and other companies who’re serious about it.
Best financial move I ever made? Latch on to a company that has purpose and a great product, then cash out for the things that matter. I just wish I’d had capital back when Apple launched the iPhone!
(P.S. to all the haters who’re gonna come at me with downvotes: I have more dollars than the number of downvotes you’ll ever be able to dish out! So come at me brah.)
