Freelance Your Way to Freedom

22Key Concepts for Investing Your Money

A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they've got terrible temperaments. You need to keep raw, irrational emotion under control.

— Charlie Munger

With more money comes more responsibility. I learned this the hard way in 2018 when an article in CNBC extensively broke down the money I was making. Messages from financial planners from around the world poured into my email inbox. People tried to “catch me” in a lie, asking me questions about how I was investing the money to prove to themselves I must be telling tall tales. At 25 years old, with very little financial education in my pocket after completing a degree in political science, I really didn't know what to do with the money. But I knew I had a responsibility to do something with it—if I could figure out how to earn it, then dammit, I was going to figure out how to invest it.

My solution was doing nothing with it for another two to three years. Yes, you can cringe all you want. I left hundreds of thousands of dollars in checking accounts. I know how inflation works, and I know I wasn't growing my money by doing that. But I had an awareness that I did not have the financial investment maturity I needed to invest it in a way that felt comfortable to me. And looking back, I am so happy I listened to my gut and took my time, as opposed to rushing into investing. Most of the “advice” I was given would have prevented me from becoming a real estate investor today. ...